THE LATEST THING 
AND OTHER THINGS 



Books by 
ALEXANDER BLACK 

The Great Desire 

The Seventh Angel 

Modern Daughters 

Miss Jerry 

Richard Gordon 

A Capital Courtship 

The Girl and the Guardsman 

Miss America 

The Story of Ohio 

Thorney 



THE LATEST THING 

AND OTHER THINGS 
By ALEXANDER BLACK 

Author of "The Great Desire" "The Seventh Angel" Etc. 




HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 
NEW YORK AND LONDON 1922 






The Latest Thing 



Copyright, 1922, by Harper & Brothers 
Printed in the United States of America 



FEB -2 1922 

©CI.A654492 



TO 

SARAH MacCRAE BLACK 



/'N using the subtitle, "and other things" it will be plain 
that I have avoided characterizing the elements of this 
volume. The truth is that even essays might seem to 
have become class conscious; and beyond all that — well, 
we are living in the midst of bewildering subtleties of classi- 
fication. One comes to suspect that while much has been 
said (for example) in favor of naming sins pleasantly, it 
is shrewder to shirk labels where the thing can be done 
in a decent way. Many a virtue has landed in jail for 
the misdemeanor of a misnomer. 

I mention such a matter here because this is the place for 
the confession of dutiable luggage, and because the mellow 
practice of a preliminary gesture, as in opening an after- 
dinner speech, even if foolish in itself, should not, perhaps, 
be permitted to die out. Unless the prefatory franchise is 
maintained by running an occasional car over the tracks, 
some writer who really needed the privilege, for any high 
or peculiar purpose, might be sorely embarrassed. 

Also, it will not be inappropriate to mention that certain 
of these casuals have met audiences in the "Atlantic," the 
"Century," "Harper's," the "Bookman" and elsewhere. 
Certain others, in the spot light of this print, now have a 
presumptuously personal, sometimes even rather an unkempt 
look, as not yet having dressed for dinner; as being still, in 
fact, in the hunting clothes of their individual adventure. 
However, though the Gentle Reader is quaintly obsolete, the 
Discriminating Reader, who needs no charts {and must 
summon a special patience for prefaces), will quite know 
how to separate the shameless from the better mannered. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

The Latest Thing 1 

The Dictatorship op the Dull 19 

Looking Literary 39 

The Truth About Women 57 

Birlia Pauperum 73 

"The Last of the Great" 85 

Half Gods and the Goddess 103 

The Producer 119 

Giving and Taking , 127 

Foreigners 133 

Legs 141 

The Desk 161 

The Camera 169 

The Eleven o'Clock 177 

Coincidences 185 

What's In a Place? 193 

Heroine Complexes 211 

On Broadway 219 

Clothes and the Woman 231 

Respice Flnem 243 

What They Want 249 

Artist and Audience 277 

Mixing 293 



THE LATEST THING 



THE LATEST THING 

THERE is a real vividness in my recollec- 
tion of an early definition of "news." 
When my beginning editor said, "News 
is essentially the unusual" I was able to work 
out a fine piece of comforting philosophy. If 
all that we saw on the first page represented the 
unusual, then people in general were not being 
divorced, murdered, nor robbed; not having 
their houses burned, not finding fault with their 
legislators, not punishing their thinkers, not 
dissatisfied with landlords, not in rebellion 
against dirty streets, not feverishly interested 
in clothes and alcohol, nor hysterical about 
sex. 

Under the spell of such a definition it was 
possible to feel a kind of calmness, an assured 
serenity as to a preponderant Tightness. The 
worse the first page looked, the heavier the 
emphasis on the disastrous and the scandalous, 
the greater became the emphasis on the 
implied general absence of these appearances. 
It might have seemed that no practical op- 
timist could get along without the company 

3 



THE LATEST THING 

of a nice first page, coming, like the Lord's 
mercies, "new every morning." Reasoning 
from the certified unusual became a delight- 
fully reinforcing privilege, if not a duty. 

There was enough of the plausible in the 
definition and its corollary to give one pause. 
History, unless it is the galloping kind that 
permits the wars and the plagues to bump one 
another, appears to show definite proportions 
of the usual and the exceptional. The char- 
acter in Sudermann who stood at the window, 
murmuring, "It's always raining," was obvi- 
ously inaccurate. Weather statistics were all 
against her. Fire insurance assumes that 
flames usually keep their place. In the matter 
of sheer proportion statistical science might 
appear rather to favor the optimist. 

Yet nothing is plainer than the elemental 
sameness of much that must pass as news. 
When the "unusual" begins to bore us we 
become suspicious. In the end we may come 
to see that not the unusual, but simply the 
new, is the point of emphasis, that while the 
elementally usual keeps its likeness, superficial 
newness is constantly in change. The newness 
is not in the fire, but in the house that is 
burned. The novelty is not in the scandal, but 
in the dramatis personal. To-day never hap- 
pened before. 

Interest in the new is as elemental as our 

4 



THE LATEST THING 

interest in something to eat. It not only has 
its passion point and its pathology, but its 
strange variations of expression. Some people 
are gluttons for newness; in others the new 
excites aversion. It would be possible to claim 
that interest in the new is essentially a human 
interest, since the lower creatures are not 
addicted to novelties. Yet the aversion seems 
to be quite as human, or if not quite as human 
in its degree, at least definitely a human family 
trait of some familiarity. Perhaps both are 
equally respectable. History does not make 
the case wholly clear, though the inference that 
the new has had the better of it may seem to be 
pretty well founded. 

Evidently both instincts have always been 
in the blood of the race. A sense of the new is 
written in the Aurignacian cave drawings. It 
is certain that a five-o'clock "extra" would 
have made a tremendous hit in a Palaeolithic 
village, particularly, of course, if it were 
illustrated. "All the Athenians and stran- 
gers which were there," says the writer of the 
Acts, "spent their time in nothing else but 
either to tell or to hear some new thing." 
(The disaster to poor Aristides fell when his 
title lost its freshness. Nothing really old 
irritates like something that has just ceased to 
be new. Yesterday's hero must wait awhile.) 

Responsiveness to the titillations of novelty 
2 5 



THE LATEST THING 

is to be traced in every age. How closely the 
instinct may be allied to hysteria is indicated 
in countless instances. (Some punster sturdy 
♦enough to carry the onus should try new- 
K>sis.) And in the shadow lurks hatred for 
the new simply because it is new. Making 
terms with this implacable opponent, or going 
into open fight with it, has scrawled the 
usual in history. To get itself established the 
new has always had a monotony of conflict with 
the haters as well as its perilous intervals with 
those of its first friends whose intoxication 
came to the stage of the "hang over." The 
plain people who, without hatred for either 
the new or the old, have thought that simple 
newness is not enough, have often been over- 
looked altogether. 

For some reason people in America are 
described as illustrating a particularly lively 
phase of the ardor for newness. Americans 
themselves are in the habit of assuming that 
the point is well taken. There is in it a rather 
flattering suggestion of being "up and com- 
ing." We have, perhaps reasonably, come to 
think that we are extraordinarily clever in in- 
vention, and have even grown to be so sure of 
this that it is often a bit shocking to learn that 
other countries have stumbled upon an idea 
or so. The American who resigned from the 
Patent Office because he was sure everything 

6 



THE LATEST THING 

had been invented and that the place could 
have no future for him, indicated what is sup- 
posed to be the characteristically restless native 
temperament. The joke lies, of course, in the 
fact that this was in 1833. A "glad hand" for 
the new of any sort has, in general, appealed to 
us as indicating a progressive temper. We 
like the word enterprise. "What's new?" is, 
it may be, not wholly an American salutation, 
but it is unquestionably typical. We should, 
naturally, not like to be accused, as in the case 
of the Athenians, of spending our time "in 
nothing else but either to tell or to hear some 
new thing," but we are likely to pardon a good 
deal to the spirit of alert curiosity, quite as if 
we had invented that too. How simply hu- 
man we are in this particular is not often 
suspected. The antiquity of humanness is to 
be discovered in antiquity, but antiquity is no 
place for those who are vigilant for the new. 
Certainly those who are still doing "nothing 
else" can have no time to go back. 

The nervous eagerness for the new that is 
represented by fashion — fashion in its modern 
sense — is certainly not universal. China, for 
example, has never shown a glimmer of the 
trait. Plainly there is a difference between a 
fashion that codifies and maintains and a 
fashion that expresses the very spirit of 
change. Both elicit voluntary submission. Both 

7 



THE LATEST THING 

produce uniformities. But they are utterly- 
different. You might give a gold bracelet to an 
African savage girl, and she might privately 
study it with wonder, but you could not make 
her wear it in public. Where the code is, and 
has been for centuries, in favor of bracelets in 
iron or bone or wood, you will scarcely find a 
figure bold enough openly to display a varia- 
tion. The pressure of the established is older 
than the neolithic. The man who endured the 
ordeal of carrying the first umbrella must have 
been convinced of that. 

The fashion that interprets the itch for 
change is another matter. This assuredly does 
"nothing else" but peer tensely for the new. 
Newness is its basic quality. It subdivides 
newness. Its high spot is the latest thing. 

In clothes this passion is not merely dra- 
matic. It is sacramental. When Emerson 
quoted the remark that a consciousness of being 
well dressed imparts a peace and confidence 
which even religion may scarcely bestow, he 
was considering the pressure of a social expec- 
tation which only a Socrates might ignore. 
This pressure can be defied. "Bohemian" 
rebellion (in a New York, for example) may 
bob its hair and leave off stockings. But its 
difference is soon standardized, and presently 
there is no way in which the bohemian can be 
different save by being conventional again. 

8 



THE LATEST THING 

The Greenwich Village girl, aspiringly radical, 
who wept when it was discovered that she was 
really married to her husband, was illustrating 
the fate not of a defiance, but of a fashion. 

Clothes fashion offers the most conspicuous 
and the most successful exploitation of the new 
because, of all the avenues open to the expres- 
sion of superficial change, it presents the 
amplest opportunities. Its implements of vari- 
ation are the most amenable as well as the most 
spectacular. We must admit this whether it 
is of something we might choose to call whimsi- 
cal, or of something as intrinsically horrible as 
the black lips of the heroine in the movies. 
Incidentally, newness in clothes has enormous 
"attention value" compared with almost any 
other media. A girl with a shrinking mind, 
diffident speech, and a habit of self-effacement 
(there are such girls!) can scorch a situation 
with a scarlet hat — if it chances that scarlet 
hats have not been happening — and do so 
without a sign of timidity. A newness in her- 
self would be terrifying to her. A newness in 
the hat, a newness to this point of excoriating 
conspicuousness, she can carry without a 
tremor. It is evident that in her mind the hat 
receives the impact. She insists upon that. 
If you find your attention fixed upon her she 
is disappointed. "You haven't said a word 
about my hat!" 

9 



THE LATEST THING 

Each clothes newness has merely a theoreti- 
cal life period. There is only a constructive 
recess between one expression and another. No 
amoeba has a shorter existence. As a matter 
of sheer dress art, the newest thing dies as soon 
as it has really happened. In the fever of this 
iteration there is nothing for it but to beat the 
calendar — to flaunt a winter hat in the early 
fall and a spring hat before the snow stops, 
thus adding paradox to the preciosity. 

It is quite plain that no other art has any- 
thing like such a privilege. Even the fluid 
elements of language can reach no correspond- 
ing pace. The latest thing in slang has an 
appreciable life, and you never can tell when 
it may acquire real age. As Mr. Howells once 
suggested, the new slang word may drop its s 
and become lang-uage at last. The new word 
is thus under a double suspicion. It is first a 
vulgar intruder; then it may marry into the 
family, in which case one has to be civil to it. 

Probably it is true that in all the arts mere 
newness, mere difference, is disproportion- 
ately acknowledged. But the refreshment of 
change for its own sake is never likely to 
be successfully disparaged on that account. 
George Moore extolled the genius of Degas 
because he discovered the possibilities of a 
shop window. Pennell's discovery of sky- 
scrapers was surely quite as significant and 

10 



THE LATEST THING 

vastly more provocative. When art pretends 
that subjects mean nothing at all, it is stressing 
the claims of surface newness. Insight and its 
revelations continue to be the final test of 
genius and to suggest that the new vision is 
the real advent. 

There is always fresh astonishment in the 
fact that people who are sensitive about new- 
ness in one art are so often content with the 
dregs of another. Evidently most of us are 
specialists in newness. A woman who would 
blush to be convicted of a last season's sleeve 
will use last season's slang without shame. She 
is still saying "hectic" and that she is "simply 
crazy about it," without consciousness of crime, 
and the word-artist, perhaps morbidly alert to 
avoid the battered phrase, will tranquilly per- 
mit the padding to remain in the shoulders of 
his dress coat. 

Scandal, I take it, must be new to be accept- 
able. If it is not fresh it will lack the pollon 
of believableness. Since the newest accusation 
is the most accepted, newness, here as else- 
where, has its own tang. "What everybody 
believes is never true," says Nietzsche. What 
everybody has had interval to hear a second 
time will not be believed by everybody. Fling 
a scandalous accusation at a man and practi- 
cally everybody may believe it at first, espe- 
cially if it is incredible. After a little time even 

11 



THE LATEST THING 

the stupidest minds lose a little of sureness 
about it, and with time enough there is always 
a tendency to outlaw the whole thing because 
it is old. When the man has been dead suffi- 
ciently long the inclination is to decide that 
possibly it wasn't true at all. In any event, 
not being new scandal, it isn't imperative to 
believe it. 

Except in the matter of fashion and scandal 
most conversation is lacking in any pretense 
of newness. One need not resent this as an 
absence of artifice. Nothing is more trying 
than talk that strains to produce new tricks. 
We are agreed that small talk, like small 
change, is indispensable. New forms of ordin- 
ary salutation would be appalling, and we all 
understand that when one says, "What's 
new?" he doesn't necessarily wish to know. A 
new way of saying, "How are you?" might, 
indeed, elicit absolutely disastrous detail. We 
should, I think, make some allowance for this 
in estimating the conversation, so called, that 
is incidental to purely social adventure. When 
Remy de Gourmont insists that talking to some 
people is "like chewing a blotter," one cannot 
avoid the suspicion that his asperity acquired 
its edge not merely from a kind of person, but 
from a kind of situation. "Starting some- 
thing" in the wrong place or at the wrong time 
is often as calamitous for the sensitive as start- 

12 



THE LATEST THING 

ing something with the wrong person. With 
regard to talk, it is clear that, in the average 
experience, most places and most times may 
seem to be wrong. When we feel savage, most 
persons quite naturally come into the same 
classification. All of which tends to give a 
thrill to the discovery of rightness. Some one 
to talk to is the object of an elemental hunger, 
but this need not mean that the some one 
would be welcome if his talk were too new. 
Haven't you experienced the restfulness of trite 
persons — persons all of whose ideas and expres- 
sions have a mellowed oldness, even when they 
themselves are quite young? You need no 
alertness whatever. No impertinent newness 
will jump into your lap like an intrusive poodle. 
You can sit back with such persons and enjoy 
liberty from the prickly contact of real thought. 
They are as tranquilizing as a geranium. 

The real crisis for any of us is in that moment 
when the great new idea knocks at the door of 
the mind. It may be but a tapping. It may 
have a thunder in it. At first, perhaps, while 
we are interrogating, it gets but one toe inside 
the door, so that we cannot slam a rejection. 
(Some people have safety chains on all their 
mental doors.) The idea may come in the 
robes of Art. Art, "style," are but the cloth- 
ing, the expression of ideas, and all ideas do 
not come in the garb of conscious device. The 

13 



THE LATEST THING 

challenge of the new idea may come as when, 
by the Hibernian tradition, a hat is tossed into 
a room. "Am I welcome?" Being admitted 
to contact, the coming of the Latest Thing, 
when it is a veritable Idea, may represent for 
you the supreme hour. You may afterward 
show it the door. You may kick it down- 
stairs and hope not to be haunted. You may 
let it stay. Letting it stay may turn out 
to be a momentous hospitality, fearfully up- 
setting to mental housekeeping. When the 
latest thing carries not a bit of jargon, a frip- 
pery of color, a twist of taffeta, a whimsical 
dissonance of music, a freak of draftsmanship, 
a changed slouch in the human figure, a fresh 
futility in politics, a new wrinkle in religion; 
when it carries not merely a new inflection, but 
a new flame, a concept, a revelation, that 
grows in the warmth of the mind to dominating 
dimensions, and throws into a changed per- 
spective all notions of living and of destiny, 
the ultimate test has arrived. 

History is littered with tragedies of Latest 
Things that were Ideas. These may have 
found their man in a climax of action, or in a 
still night when choice meant a lone agony of j 
renunciation. "Obsessed by an idea." There 
you have it. A fanaticism is the other fellow's 
obsession. Then again, the right idea some- 
times lodges with the wrong man, or the other 

14 



THE LATEST THING 

way about. Bitter platitudes rise up to remind 
us of the reiterated calamities that have stalked 
the new idea; of how often the new idea sen- 
tenced its disciple to the thumbscrews. For 
the latest thing is often too early. Any new 
idea is too soon for the shut-minded, and each 
coming sets up a terror somewhere. The gro- 
tesqueness of recantation, the pathos of all the 
thought-martyrdoms, of figures cringing or 
courageous under the stare of the established, 
remind us of how often the latest thing in 
thinking can be the one unpardonable newness. 
The record survives, but we become adept in 
accepting martyrs without feeling implicated. 
We see Roger Bacon in his cell as a most unfor- 
tunate victim of an obsolete stupidity. We 
are sorry without acquiring any self -accusatory 
suspicion. Something like an ethical statute of 
limitations seems to save us from chagrin when 
we hear about a Galileo as a Harvey. We charge 
up as a joke upon an earlier civilization the 
disturbance created by a Darwin, born too late 
to be burned, but soon enough to be consigned 
to the hell of the shut-minded. We get the 
humor of the fury against anaesthesia when it 
first dares to question the God-established 
panacea of pain. We roar with laughter over 
the doctors, in convention, protesting against 
the railroad (then exhibiting the pace of a brisk 
trot) not merely as in its effect mischievous, 

15 



THE LATEST THING 

but as a spectacle that injured the public 
nerves. We giggle over Ericsson's plight. 
"You know," said the Admiralty, "your boat 
with its screw propeller seems to go and to 
maneuver, but you must see that a craft cannot 
be steered from the point at which the power 
is applied." The missiles thrown at a Susan 
Anthony or a Lucy Stone for indicating that 
women might safely leave the kitchen for an 
hour or so each year to go to a voting place 
remain with us as a merely pictorial whimsical- 
ity. The suggestion of a Charlotte Gilman that 
all mothers are not necessarily good mothers, 
that affection can be ignorant, that childhood 
and the race have rights and needs trans- 
cending the elemental implications of mere 
maternity, sent a shiver through sentimental- 
ism, but though day nurseries and co-operative 
housekeeping have become a commonplace, the 
same sentimentalism remains vigilantly on the 
job. 

Our quaintly self-conscious era is still at the 
old tricks. We are still being tested as Athens, 
or Syria, or Salem was tested. We have aban- 
doned certain systems of torture, retained 
others, invented a few delicate variations. We 
still pillory, though only with paper stocks. 
We still banish, though with a more elaborate 
collective formula. We are supposed to have 
a larger sense of history. We admit with an 

16 



THE LATEST THING 

increasing glibness the book fact of vast pro- 
gressive change, but we betray the same old 
disposition to fury when some one suggests 
that we are not through. The latest thing is 
right enough if it is amusing; if we can banter 
about it or buy it or keep our privilege of 
detachment; if it has a decent propriety in 
keeping itself separated as a sight or sound. 
If it assails the All-of-Us, if it insists, if it 
demands, if it involves confession, atonement 
— if it involves root change — it ceases to be 
merely the Latest Thing and becomes the 
Latest Menace. Art, business, sociology all 
know its interruptions. It is the Eternal Dis- 
turber. It is the enemy of all that would 
"stay put." It checks the yawn of compla- 
cency. It jostles the strutting "art form." It 
frightens the finished. Which is to say that 
the latest thing is our oldest paradox. 



THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE DULL 



. 



THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE 
DULL 

THE biographer of Philip II described the 
Inquisition as a "heavenly remedy, a 
guardian angel of Paradise." No des- 
potism can be so galling as to quench every 
apologist. Naturally the despot has a good 
word for himself, and it is a part of his business 
to prod his press agent. Quite as naturally 
the press agent completes the calamity. On 
one of those days when we feel the presence of 
Mr. Conrad's two veiled figures, Doubt and 
Melancholy, "pacing endlessly in the sunshine 
of the world," the press agent does the trick. 
The right rhapsody finishes that which oppres- 
sion began. We bear an oppression because it 
may have enveloped us gradually with the 
seeming unavoidableness of a changed tem- 
perature, or, if it comes a bit suddenly, like the 
contact of a shrinking shoe, we may try adjust- 
ing ourselves as to an inevitable annoyance; 
but when some one drives in the nail of the 
enabling adjective, philosophy fails. 

We should, of course, cultivate with regard 
3 21 



THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE DULL 

to life what Montaigne cultivated with regard 
to books — "a skipping wit." But one can't 
skip a despotism unless it is distant enough. 
We can be academic about those that are far 
enough off. We can look at Russia and decide 
that the dictatorship of a proletariat is good or 
bad, according to our ideals, and especially, 
perhaps, according to our information. Per- 
haps, too, we may decide, with regard to a 
dictatorship in Russia, that it gets a good deal 
of attention not because it is a dictatorship, 
but because it is different. 

All of us who are governed live under some 
sort of dictatorship. The benevolent despotism 
of democracy can be like a padded cell in which 
one is supposed not to be able to hurt himself. 
Mostly radicalism expresses consolation equiva- 
lent to a hunger strike. And all dictatorship is 
not political. The doctrine of supply and 
demand sets up a mighty dictatorship. So does 
all dogma for all who accept. So do fashion 
and family. There is dictatorship in science's 
word "normal." The prefix "ab" builds an 
inquisitorial spiked chair for rebel or genius. 

There are moments when a sense of individ- 
ual security may reach so nearly the dimensions 
of an individual serenity as to remind us that 
it takes two to make a dictatorship. There 
are other moments when we feel sharply 
impelled to go out and look for the dictators 

22 



THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE DULL 

and have the thing done with. In our evenest 
mood, one in which we feel most assured of 
being balanced, and reasonably if not fanati- 
cally forbearing, we can scarcely hope to escape 
consciousness of that widest and most per- 
meative of all dictatorships, the dictatorship 
of the dull. 

The dull. . . . Not the frail who have never 
begun, but the free who have finished; not the 
stupid who cannot think, but the dull who 
object to thinking; not the submerged, the 
thwarted who have never had a chance, but 
the mediocre who admire themselves, the com- 
placent who have fixed the final mold — all who 
make up the legion of self -halted men and the 
sisterhoods of smugness. These have an im- 
mensity of numbers. They swarm to the 
horizon, though they never seem to recognize 
that there is a horizon. There is no thinkable 
situation in which they do not impinge. In 
our arrogant moments we think of them all as 
Barrier. In our weak moments we may won- 
der in the matter of the vast, sticky obstacle, 
whether we are not ourselves entangled and 
have not begun to belong to the hopelessly 
finished. 

Of course only a mood in which we can quite 
securely feel that we do not belong can be 
effective for attack. A plunge into the past 
is a great help in effecting a sense of detach- 

23 



THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE DULL 

ment. History makes it plain enough that 
sinister cleverness could not have succeeded 
without the support of the dull, but it seldom 
shows how steadfastly dullness itself has sta- 
bilized the uncomfortable, how its sheer per- 
vasiveness has affected the eternal conflict 
between idealism and the forces supporting 
inertia. Inertia is often confused with dull- 
ness. Inertia is, in fact, merely dullness's 
operating weight. It gives it the formidable 
displacement that helps block the way. In- 
ertia does not intrude. It has no passion to 
prohibit, for example. It lets everything alone, 
good and bad. It giggles or whispers, and sub- 
sides. But dullness can have qualities. It can 
be both obstinate and aggressive. It can assert. 
Intrusion is indispensable to certain of its 
moods, because it has its pride, its sense of 
responsibility, its recognition of a common 
enemy — the creative. 

How definitely dullness represents a mental 
condition rather than a class, yet quite surely 
assembles its class, in all ages and in all places, 
is echoed in every creative adventure, whether 
the adventure be political, industrial, social, 
educational, or artistic. It mingles in every 
group. It hates the radical more than it hates 
the reactionary, but it shadows both. If liber- 
ality cannot be trusted to respect dullness, 
neither can conservatism. When dullness can 

24 



THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE DULL 

see nothing else it can see its duty. It is the 
most active censor. 

Of course, all criticism is a form of censor- 
ship. When it is creative criticism we are in 
the habit of saying that it fills a high office. 
When it is dullness in action we ought to have 
no trouble in recognizing the source, yet furies 
of resentment often lead us to forget that dull- 
ness did not invent criticism nor introduce cen- 
sorship. Doing away with criticism because it 
is so frequently stupid would be like abandon- 
ing any other useful implement because the 
foolish or vicious may misuse it. 

But dullness's worst offense is not giving any 
good implement a bad name. Its worst offense 
is the benumbing influence of its presence. It 
casts a pall over the creative. It perverts the 
acoustics of the world. It tramples the gardens 
of invention; not always by any wish to de- 
stroy, as exasperation is ever ready to conclude, 
yet with all the destructive effects of its weight 
and pervasiveness. The odd thing is that with 
so much of mass it is frequently and violently 
contemptuous of "the masses." It is willing 
to be the Public. But it is never willing to be 
Crowd. It is as glib about "mobs" as about 
morality. 

Thus all creative effort encounters dullness 
as the foreground obstacle, and since creative 
effort can have its bigotries, deadlocks are 

25 



THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE DULL 

repeated. One sees this again and again in 
the matter of audiences. It is to be read in 
myths like that of the Tired Business Man. 
Dullness' s dislike of thinking leads it to use 
all sorts of evasions to escape admitting the 
trait; such, for example, as the familiar plea 
as to having thought so much that it wants a 
rest. People who are annoyed by intelligent 
plays or intelligent books do not turn away 
because they are tired, but because they care 
more for something else. They may not always 
be dull. They may only have been dulled. 
Life has extraordinarily diverse effects on peo- 
ple who live through it. Some people learn to 
want life to be livelier. Others want it to be 
quieter; it hurts their eyes and ears. Some 
people are sharpened by life. Others are 
blunted by it. Dislike of thinking can emerge 
from all experience with its prejudice unim- 
paired. It is a sturdy growth. By an effort 
it can "set and think," but it can "just set" 
with a more normal facility. And it can "just 
set" in a legislature quite as definitely as in a 
dooryard. 

So that to ask thinking is in many situations 
to ask a sacrifice. It is true that audiences 
which protest against being asked to think are 
often able to make out a fairly plausible case 
against art. Artists are sometimes caught in 
the act of maintaining that art must not think, 

26 



THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE DULL 

but must only feel. If, as Mr. Max Eastman 
has reminded us again, art must be "playful" 
to be successfully creative, if it must be "very 
free and irresponsible," it is hard to see how 
audiences can be denied the right to be play- 
ful and to watch or to listen or to read in a 
very free and irresponsible mood. The para- 
dox is, of course, that a playful thing, repre- 
senting pure response to emotion, is often 
saturated with thought, and that a joyous 
response is not denied the right to be intelli- 
gent. We have to remember, too, that an 
audience in a given place is handicapped in 
thinking where it is not handicapped in feeling. 
Mass accentuates emotion where it retards 
thought. With a reader the case is different. 
Except for the infectious influence of bally- 
hooing about a book, the reader is left to be 
kindled by the writer's direct action. Maybe 
there is for the writer some advantage in this. 
Yet without the help of spectacle the writer 
must begin with a larger assumption as to 
thinking, or at least with a larger assumption 
as to attention, and the total must count as a 
handicap in the earning of response. To chal- 
lenge closeness of attention is the beginning 
of a request for thinking, and the writer who 
asks for prolonged concentration asks for some- 
thing that narrows his audience automatically. 
He must first lose all who cannot think or who 

27 



THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE DULL 

object to thinking, then all who are good only 
for a spurt. In time he may come to have the 
pathetic satisfaction of sharply recognizing the 
dividing line between people who really read 
and people who only own sets. 

The motion-picture hall has been called a 
haven for the dull. Certain complaints against 
the motion picture have been grotesquely 
severe. Though it begins at zero and can 
entertain without asking more than mere 
consciousness, the cinema has an almost unlim- 
ited range so far as its possibilities go. I have 
seen the Odyssey and Macbeth on the screen. 
Both were admirably done. But they had a 
short life. The cinema, by the conditions of 
its present distribution, cannot appeal to 
special groups, and always to appeal to general 
groups is to pass under the censorship of the 
dull. No official censorship could be so relent- 
less. An official censorship can be diagrammed 
because it starts with a diagram. The censor- 
ship of the dull is immeasurable. The one 
arouses shrieks of protest. The other is accepted 
as a phenomenon of sale. The strong prob- 
ability that the preferences of dullness will be 
translated by another dullness, or by a bewil- 
dered producer who is pretty well dulled by 
the pressure, accounts for the feeble average 
of merit, and repeated failure to please even 
the dull. 

28 



THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE DULL 

Education knows the dictatorship. It knows 
how often education bleeds between the two 
millstones. It knows how completely pro- 
digious dullness in school committees and uni- 
versity trustees may reflect the dullness that 
sentinels and selects. It knows the penalty 
of offending dullness. It learns to prefer the 
locks tep of conformity to the strait- jacket in 
solitary. It knows why, among all the things 
that are taught, early or late, thinking is most 
inconvenient and most frequently hazardous. 
To teach thinking is to teach individuality, 
and the original is the enemy of the curriculum 
— and the committee. The efficiency theory of 

j education is of a machine with standardized 
parts. If any teacher breaks, it is convenient 

j to be able to pick up a machine-punched dup- 
licate at any service station. The theory makes 

i a profound appeal to dullness, because it avoids 
contact with originality — because it doesn't 

j disturb the finished. When dullness starts out 
to buy an education for its boy it wants the 
efficiency kind. It wants standard goods, not 
the sort that puts ideas into his head. 

A liberal education! Suppose it should hap- 
pen! Suppose the boy came home with new 
notions about Rome or the Pilgrims; suppose 
he came home not with the proper impress of 
machine-made parts, but with a new feeling 
about history and life, a new sense of personal 

29 



THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE DULL 

privilege, a new impulse as to what he was 
going to do with himself and the world. What 
is dullness then to conclude about the system? 
What is it to conclude as to that bunch of 
"dangerous radicals" down there? Are tlie 
trustees asleep? Somebody ought to be dis- 
ciplined. Dullness didn't raise its boy to be 
a Bolshevik. 

To dullness, thinking is a radicalism. If you 
begin by being disrespectful as to your grand- 
father everybody knows that you are likely to 
end by being seditious as to your Congressman. 
If you use your pulpit for talk about life and 
growth instead of sticking to Jeremiah; if you 
preach about poverty as a living fact instead 
of being content to quote it as a literary illus- 
tration of a strictly theological compassion; if 
you forget that revelation is historic, that 
religion is finished; if you turn from the labor 
in a biblical vineyard to the labor in your own 
town factories, dullness will find a way of re- 
minding you that it is no part of a preacher's 
business to meddle in "politics." 

When I wrangled with Emma Goldman about 
"social pressure," we reached no disagreement 
as to the reality of that phenomenon. The 
anarchist thought such pressure was all-suffic- 
ing. I thought it needed its written wishes and 
its committee. But there was no escape, by 
either logic, from the enormous, enveloping, 

30 



THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE DULL 

and unconquerable reality of the pressure 
itself. I emerged with an impression that the 
anarchist saw the great force as reaching a 
kind of unity, like gravitation, and she could 
call to her support the formidable philosophy 
of monism. Yet I saw groups rather than a 
group — I saw oneness as a destination or an 
ideal rather than as a working fact, and felt 
that the anarchism which wanted no law, and 
any antipodal theory which wanted more law, 
both were ignoring the persistent diversity 
that disturbs the oneness of the world. I saw 
the inert (in all "classes") who go after noth- 
ing; the "winged creatures without feet," their 
eyes fixed on infinity; the real creators and 
pathfinders; the mothering people who ask 
least and give most; the herders, the procurers, 
and the leeches; and I saw the dull who domi- 
nate the Middle and think they are Stability 
because they are a weight. 

As a stabilizer dullness always feels itself to 
be the appointed custodian of respectability. 
It finds war respectable, and a boxing match 
an infamy. It is not the sole supporter of war 
nor the sole objector to the boxing match. 
But it is a mainstay to both contentions. It 
is the mainstay of jails. Plenty of jails here 
and hereafter becomes a concomitant of the 
dull brand of righteousness. The comfort of 
being out of jail assumes the presence of a sub- 

31 



THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE DULL 

stantial proportion of the duly padlocked. A 
dull heaven is predicated on a populous hell. 
Of all the arguments used to keep a dreamer 
like Eugene Debs in a cell, there has been, 
naturally, none that could stress the disap- 
pointment to dullness that must result from 
letting him out. 

Yet dullness loves to save if it may discrimi- 
nate. It saves cats, but is inclined to find the 
saving of babies as rather messy. In fact, it 
indicates that babies, by and large, are an 
indelicacy. Babies suggest sex, and sex — well, 
you know what sex is. Dullness hasn't been 
able effectively to rebuke nature's invention of 
sex, but it has done all it can. It is still respec- 
table to belong to one sex or the other. Beyond 
that you are in danger. 

The dull get themselves divorced, but they 
dislike divorce as too frequently noisy. They 
take here the same position they occupy in an 
apartment house. It isn't the landlord who 
dislikes children. His discomfort is occasioned 
not by the children, but by the complaints of 
the dull tenants who resent the ill-advised 
fecundity of those who have yet to learn that 
it is bad form to breed in captivity. 

Moreover, to the dull, children are likely to 
seem an economic error, an error frightfully 
expensive as well as complicating. Perhaps 
this is why dullness, after its first violent attack 

32 



THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE DULL 

on birth control propaganda, attained an 
equally violent silence. The offense of repro- 
ducing seems to be mitigated by avoidance of 
the plural. If one child expressed the idea, 
why be tautological? Theory, in this instance, 
is illustrated by the story of the practical man 
whose wife first had twins, then triplets. When, 
on the third adventure, she produced a single 
baby, the husband remarked that he was glad 
she had at last got down to a good business 
basis. 

The dull are profound believers in "pros- 
perity." They believe in holding the thought. 
To face toward prosperity one must turn his 
back on the opposite. It is well enough to see 
a slum from a sight-seeing bus, but if you 
contact it too closely, if you admit it fully, you 
are letting it influence you, and if you let it 
influence you how can you give single-minded 
attention to prosperity? How can you "get 
on" if you stop to listen to all the blind, or 
maimed, or sick, or ill-treated that line the 
path? There was a Galilean who stopped 
repeatedly. Dullness crucified him. 

Where "Society" has a capital S, dullness is 
in charge. American "Society" is accused of 
being the dullest in the world because it alone 
leaves out the intellectuals. We cannot deny 
that it omits certain elements indispensable to 
a European social group, but it might be inac- 

33 



THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE DULL 

curate to contend that it has not tried to get 
these elements in. It is possible that American 
intellectuals are less perfectly house-broken 
than the European sort. And it would be 
foolish to assume that scientists, writers, and 
political pretenders cannot, when rightly se- 
lected, add a harmonious dullness to a society 
anywhere. It is sufficient to note that the 
organized emptiness called "Society" is utterly 
congenial to dullness. To be free of any of 
these people with ideas, to dodge books and 
paintings, to dismiss with a stale adjective 
some play dullness has interrupted by coming 
in late, to shake off the horror of "labor 
troubles," to talk a jargon, dance nakedly, 
devour filigrees of food, and fatten in limou- 
sines, appeal to dullness as an inexhaustible 
resource. 

Yet dullness is so sensitive as to any frivolity 
in which it may not happen to join, that one 
of its most persistent activities of intrusion 
is in demonstrating that an indecent levity 
is the other fellow's amusement. In avoiding 
an issue that might be convicting to itself it is 
fertile in devices of segregation, and is equally 
fertile in ways of breaking in upon situations 
its own cowardice has invented. Wicked 
gambling is the kind it does not practice or j 
has not agreed to overlook. Naturally it seeks ] 
to hold the copyright on all definitions of sin, 

34 



THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE DULL] 

and particularly to guarantee that no sinners 
shall be amused. Macaulay supplied the clas- 
sic characterization when he said of the Puri- 
tans that they objected to bear baiting not so 
much because it hurt the bear as because the 
spectators got too much fun out of it. 

The sarcasm of Macaulay has been useful 
to modern exasperation. The berating of the 
Puritans has sometimes been stupid and some- 
times brilliant. The Puritans cartoon well. 
They are a wonderful theme, and not the least 
serviceable contribution of Puritanism has 
been that of a label for anything we don't like. 
Giving to the divagations of dullness the label 
of Puritanism seems to me altogether too much 
of a compliment. The Puritans may be respon- 
sible for Puritanism, but they are not respon- 
sible for all that in our haste for a handle we 
fasten upon the name. The Puritans were 
suspicious of beauty, and openly hostile to 
joy; they believed in a solemn God, a God 
disappointed and jealous, and they saw duty 
in the gray light of that belief; but they were 
hard thinkers if not good thinkers; they had 
no antipathy to thinking in itself. Critics of 
the Puritans will protest that they had a very- 
clear idea of the directions in which thinking 
must not go, but this cannot disturb the con- 
tention that they were essentially a thinking 
lot. They thought their way out of Europe. 

35 



THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE DULL 

They had pluck and punch, and any dull 
descendants or other members of the breed of 
the dull in general do not deserve the glamour 
of their mantle. 

It is equally plain that the dull do not de- 
serve the distinction implicit in the cries of 
savage irritation which are always being wrung 
from those who feel challenged. A thousand 
confessions prove that this rage can become a 
preoccupation. "We begin to live," says 
Mr. Yeats, "when we have conceived life as 
a tragedy." Who shall say how much this 
sense of the woeful may be due to that over- 
laid irritant of dullness? One of the ablest of 
American literary artists turned to me, in the 
midst of a social adventure of an eminent 
pleasantness, and quite as if the thing had 
flashed to him out of nowhere, to remark that 
all great art is created in a state of acute 
exasperation toward life. I was reminded 
afterward (when we are reminded of most 
things) that a conspicuous absence of dullness 
in the occasion had doubtless given twist to 
the thought. Perhaps Flaubert and others 
who have flung out parallel acerbities have 
reached incandescence at times when relief 
from pressure reminded them, in a piercing 
degree, of its essential unendurableness. 

In any case, getting the thing said is evi- 
dently a relief. To conceal irritations is to 

36 



THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE DULL 

germinate another complex. There is, of course, 
no assumption that the dull will hear. "It is 
not by insulting the Neapolitans," said Cavour, 
"that you will modify them." But modifying 
the dull is an inconceivable undertaking, as 
inconceivable as a dullness that is not modified, 
[that does not undergo changes in form and 
expression. It is change of form and expres- 
sion which is always leading to misplaced labels 
land to failures in identification of the eternal 
traits that lie underneath. 



lo 

ve 
ief 
4 [■! 

;vi- 
to 



LOOKING LITERARY 



LOOKING LITERARY 

IN the course of one of his dissections Henry 
James expresses a disenchantment the 
like of which, it is to be feared, has come 
to many another. "It was a truth," he says, 
"of which I had for some time been conscious 
that a figure with a good deal of frontage was, 
as one might say, almost never a public 
institution." 

Such a disenchantment may well be gradual 
and reluctant, for even the most sordid science 
seems to foster an expectation that phenomena 
will, in some recognizable degree, look the 
part. To be sure, we may early encounter 
the shock of discovering that Alexander the 
Great, Caesar, Napoleon, Wellington, Grant, 
had no heroic proportions, that they were little 
men, as men go; but history and poetry alike 
see to it that these figures are invested with 
abundantly identifying marks of greatness. 
We may have learned, then, to spare mere 
stature, dubiously as we may have done it in 
the case of the fighters, without altogether 

41 



LOOKING LITERARY 

giving up hope that the natural lapse may be 
corrected in later evidences. 

Mr. Howells has commented somewhere 
upon the popular attitude of mind as illus- 
trated in the familiar remark, "I thought he 
was taller." That the marked man should be 
discovered not to be tall is, unquestionably, a 
fact perennially disappointing, even after some- 
thing like resignation has been acquired. A 
stunted hero retains the capacity to give us a 
pang, even when he is not making Wagnerian 
love to a towering Brunnhilde. 

This attitude of mind is evidently not essen- 
tially vulgar or even juvenile. Writers of emi- 
nence have not been immune from the habit 
of halting before brevity of stature in other 
writers, for example, even when the discoverers 
are not so candid as Carlyle, who quite inevit- 
ably pounced upon De Quincey as "one of the 
smallest men you ever in your life beheld," 
and found Macaulay "a squat, thickset, low- 
browed, short, grizzled little man of fifty." 
The rather brutal tautology in Macaulay's 
description had, of course, collateral provoca- 
tion. You will guess what it was. Margaret 
Fuller, whom the caustic philosopher in Cheyne 
Walk set down as "a strange, lilting, lean old 
maid," remarked that "the worst of Carlyle is 
that you can't interrupt him." Macaulay, 
who was a pretty good torrent himself, with 

42 



LOOKING LITERARY 

plenty, as Emerson put it, of "fire, speed, fury, 
talent, and effrontery," tried the impossible, 
and got all three adjectives. How much worse 
Miss Fuller might have fared is to be judged 
from Carlyle's memorandum that she was 
"not nearly such a bore as I expected." 

Thus it was inevitable that George Ticknor 
should observe that Schlegel was a "short, 
thickset little gentleman," and that he should 
be relieved, apparently, to find Goethe "some- 
thing above middle size." To be only "some- 
thing above middle size" seems but vaguely 
alleviating, yet it serves the purpose of rescue 
from the class that is more sharply noted. If 
Chesterfield, for instance, could have grown 
perhaps a couple of inches further, Thackeray's 
picture of him as "a little, beetle-browed, hook- 
nosed, high-shouldered gentleman" would have 
been shaven of at least its most accusatory 
term. And the term often is an implement of 
resentment. Naturally the Goncourts men- 
tioned that Sainte-Beuve (whom they did not 
like) was small and of the provincial librarian 
type. Lamb was irritated when he picked out 
a London contemporary as "a middle-sized 
man both in nature and in understanding." 
Of course, even face-to-face, opportunity does 
not always assure conclusive estimate. Miss 
Hawkins says that Walpole was tall; Pinker- 
ton as flatly declares that he was short, though 

43 



LOOKING LITERARY 

both agree that he walked as if the floor were 
wet. 

And here is our great difficulty when it comes 
to calling up images of the literary great by 
the agency of personal testimony. "Figure," 
says Carlyle, "a fat, flabby, incurvated per- 
sonage, at once short, rotund, and relaxed, with 
a watery mouth, a snuffy nose, a pair of strange, 
brown, timid, yet earnest-looking eyes, a high 
tapering brow, and a great bush of gray hair, 
and you have some faint idea of Coleridge." 

Not so faint an idea, perhaps, if we went no 
farther. But how shall we reconcile the Carly- 
lean brutality with Wordsworth's portrait of 
the "wrapt one with the godlike forehead, the 
heaven-eyed creature"? It is such disparities 
that might well drive us to a Cubism which 
forgot the outward and visible sign altogether, 
and showed us Genius in a geometrical litter. 

Yet it is just these outward and visible signs 
that are least likely to go unsought and unmen- 
tioned. Neither nicety nor ardor of descrip- 
tion has ever seemed certain to insure forget- 
fulness of the outward shell. No adversities of 
contact deter us from eagerly reading descrip- 
tions which may disturb, or from writing the 
same sort of thing to jostle some one else's 
preconceptions. Sometimes, it is true, the 
meeting or the description may be pleasantly, 
or at least interestingly, corrective. "Instead 

44 



LOOKING LITERARY 

of having a thin and rather sharp and anxious 
face, as he has in his pictures," writes Professor 
Ticknor, after his meeting with Byron, "it is 
round and open and smiling; his eyes are light 
and not black; his air easy and careless, not 
forward and striking." But we shall meet our 
shock, you may be sure, before we have gone 
far. We shall have idealized a Fielding, then 
wince to learn that "a few pensive lines about 
the nose showed that snuff and sorrow had 
been there." We shall have been holding fast 
to some proper sort of reverence for Doctor 
Johnson, then run across a description of the 
spectacle he presented at dinner. Indeed, the 
anguish of discovering that our giant is not 
tall will pale before vastly more distressing 
readjustments. It has been said with some air 
of authority that yEsop was "so repulsive that 
his master's wife could not stand his presence 
in the house." 

The instinct by which we go on hoping, 
if not expecting, to objectify our ideals and 
our prejudices cannot be wholly sentimental. 
Though we may be piqued by the paradoxes, 
surely there is something elementally practical 
in this expectation that "looking the part" 
will, in some final and utterly verifying in- 
stance, become a fact. Despite Macbeth, there 
must be an art "to find the mind's construc- 
tion in the face" — an art questioned, to be 

45 



LOOKING LITERARY 

sure, when it is made a profession, yet one not 
at all in contempt when it is practiced in the 
connoisseur spirit. Nothing in post-Darwinian 
science seems to scold us for the expectation. 

Moreover, since life so persistently imitates 
art, we must take into account that faces may 
endeavor to look as they are expected to look. 
If Epictetus was serious in saying that "we 
ought not even by the aspect of the body to 
scare the multitude from philosophy," it need 
not be entirely fanciful to suspect that expo- 
nents of literature have felt the same obliga- 
tion. Indeed, Mr. Zangwill dares assert that 
Tennyson "dressed for the part almost as well 
as Beerbohm Tree could have done." 

This influence of the multitude is to be reck- 
oned with. Max Muller, who was astonished 
that English universities should try to develop 
manliness without duelling, admitted that in 
German universities "pistol duels are usually 
preferred by theological students, because they 
cannot easily get a living if the face is scarred 
all over." While Epictetus, like the clergyman, 
was influenced with regard to the "aspect of 
the body" by the conditions surrounding the 
delivery of philosophy in person, and while 
the literary man is not commonly a man of 
the forum, the chance that the writer may hide 
behind his book grows daily smaller. The psy- 
chological century is the most pictorial of all. 

46 



LOOKING LITERARY 

No one who is not an habitually prudent 
anchorite can be sure of escaping publication 
on the screen. 

Epictetus did not specifically insist that the 
philosopher should look like a philosopher. 
Max Miiller has not said that the clergyman 
must look like a clergyman, but the multitude 
will, you may be sure, go on matching the mask 
to the fact. Gil Bias found Doctor Sangrado 
to have "a medical face." Lucky Doctor San- 
grado, to fulfill all logical requirements and 
escape the halting obscurations! Shakespeare, 
living before photography, is assumed to have 
looked properly poetical, and thus avoids in- 
finite explanation of one sort at least. Nowa- 
days, shouldered by the camera, the painter 
must be so literal that we cannot hope to beg 
the question. Even Futurism does not sweeten 
the details. 

"He does not look like a literary man." 
There you have it, much reiterated, in news- 
paper descriptions, in "literary gossip," cur- 
rent and between stiff covers. How he should 
look, to look literary, we never are told. How 
he does look, now that he does not look literary, 
we are informed in countless phrases. 

In earlier times it was different. There can 
be no pretense that genius ever advertised 
itself by infallible signs; but there were good 
old days when you were supposed to recognize 

47 



LOOKING LITERARY 

a poet as quickly as you would a policeman. 
This must have been a great comfort. If you 
doted on poets you could be grateful for the 
label that made it easy to pick them out. If 
you disliked poets, or if you were merely cool 
about them, you might be equally grateful. 
The long hair was an immense help to the 
imagination — to the poet's, I have no doubt, 
as well as to the spectator's. It became a 
sign, and much of humanity joins the Tammany 
chieftain in welcoming the "symblem." 

The danger always was — and it came in for 
remark long before Mr. James's skepticism as 
to the "public institution" — that ample locks 
and a Byronic collar could be acquired by per- 
sons who were not literary at all, much less 
poets or real Parnassian toffs of any sort. 
Nature will have its joke and men will connive. 
If no one could be so great as Daniel Webster 
looked, I have no doubt that no one could be 
so transcendently literary as some of the coun- 
terfeits have succeeded in looking. 

But this does not change the fact that, 
though the poet, for example, might not be 
standardized, there was a standardized expec- 
tation with regard to him. There are a thou- 
sand descriptions which prove the existence of 
an accepted mold for the literary personality, 
though most description goes by resentment 
of variation. Goldsmith reminded Miss Rey- 

48 



LOOKING LITERARY 

nolds of "a low mechanic," particularly of "a 
journeyman tailor." Rogers was never for- 
given for being ugly; so gracious an observer 
as Mr. Whipple saw "something withered and 
ghastly in his appearance." The same writer 
was quite sure that Lewes was "one of the 
homeliest men in Great Britain." Miss Evans 
said that he looked like a "miniature Mira- 
beau," though she afterward (that was a richly 
significant afterward for both!) admitted that 
"he is much better than he seems." De 
Quincey was well enough pleased with the head 
of Wordsworth, but Lamb's head, he declared, 
" was absolutely truncated in the posterior region 
— sawn off, as it were, by no mean sawyer." 

Tennyson was an instance of the popularly 
acceptable type. Mrs. Carlyle, who evidently 
regarded him as extraordinarily handsome, dis- 
cerned "something of the gypsy" in his appear- 
ance, and for her this was "perfectly charming." 
Comments on the impressiveness of Tennyson 
recall the ardor of Pope in ascribing to Wych- 
erley "the true nobleman look." But of all 
handsome authors our own Motley appears to 
have been most fervently described. Lady 
Byron declared that he more resembled her 
husband than any person she had ever met. 
To Wendell Phillips this was not praise enough, 
for he insisted that Motley was handsomer 
than Byron. Bismarck, who met the American 

49 



LOOKING LITERARY 

at Gottingen University, says that Motley's 
"most striking feature" was his "uncommonly 
large and beautiful eyes," and that he "never 
entered a drawing-room without exciting the 
curiosity and sympathy of the ladies." 

However we may hesitate to commit our- 
selves to any theory of form, there can be no 
doubt that Hawthorne, Poe, Whitman, Long- 
fellow, Bryant, and Doctor Hale all visualize 
well — quite as well, perhaps, as Daudet or 
Flaubert or, for that matter, Balzac. Lowell 
always seemed to me to look more literary than 
his portraits. 

When we turn to the later type it is difficult 
not to feel that the last vestiges of human 
picturesqueness are slipping. For the Delilah 
of uniformity has shorn the world. Can the 
august modern author feel the complacency of 
Mr. Pepys when he had used his new "razer" 
after a week of lying fallow? "How ugly I was 
yesterday," he bursts forth in his diary, "and 
how fine to-day!" If a literary man delays 
having his hair cut until his family has begun 
to cut him, he may experience the emotion of 
virtuous accomplishment when the thing is 
done. But his soul knows that he was not 
merely procrastinating. Some subtle emana- 
tion from sacred tradition had the effect of 
checking him. Perhaps the idea of a Zeitgeist 
with scissors actually made him shrink. 

50 



LOOKING LITERARY 

The hard contemporary fact is that the 
gloriously maned authors are becoming sadly 
rare, even rarer than long-haired actors. The 
long-haired musician is still with us, though 
he is no longer imperative. Individual age has 
here a potent influence — age, or the getting 
through with things. What a wonderfully pic- 
turesque person Dickens was at twenty-five! 
And how matter-of-fact at forty! Browning 
suffered a similarly sobering and averaging 
effect. The same thing is true of many other 
figures in that period, and it is not easy to guess 
whether the changing fashion set in during 
their middle years, or whether advancing age 
would have effected the same change in any 
case. 

Those of us who feel bereaved by the depart- 
ure of the distinguishing aureole from the head 
of the type will linger sentimentally among 
memories inspired by Mark Twain, by George 
Meredith, by Parke Godwin, by Donald G. 
Mitchell, by Joaquin Miller, as well as by 
the bearded ones, like Fields and Alden and 
Scudder and Stedman and John Fiske. It may 
be that my impression of John Fiske's head 
was affected by the bigness of the man, but 
surely that head was more than ordinarily vik- 
ingesque. Beecher one day called to a person 
in his audience to join him on the platform. 
"Come up here, you shaggy man!" was his 

51 



LOOKING LITERARY 

challenge. It was Edward Eggleston. But, 
alas! Eggleston trimmed that splendid mane 
in his twilight years — a calamity as profound, 
it seemed to me at the time, as if old Walt had 
trimmed his. 

It might, then, be urged that a change of 
fashion has made identification of the literary 
man a nicer, a more exacting matter, though 
this would be to affront the tradition that there 
really is, in the strict sense, a literary face. But 
it does not at all explain why literary men so 
frequently (as I have suggested) look specifi- 
cally like something else. 

Close upon thirty years ago one critical com- 
mentator noted that Ibsen "did not look like 
a poet," but "like a prosperous railroad presi- 
dent." It was earlier, I think, that I read of 
George William Curtis as looking "the beau 
ideal of the English country gentleman." One 
of William James's pupils insisted that he 
looked "more like a sportsman than a profes- 
sor." Mr. Davis described Coppee, seen at 
the Grand Prix, as "suggesting a priest or a 
tragic actor." James Payn looked "more like 
a prosperous physician than author." 

Again "prosperous," mark you. There is 
something in that which should, perhaps, be 
examined. Mr. Howells in his sixties was not 
so often described as looking like a "prosper- 
ous banker" as he was, say, a score of years 

52 



LOOKING LITERARY 

earlier. Evidently the phrase had had its day. 
Authorial prosperity had become trite. Yet 
what other prosperous thing can you look like 
after you have looked like a prosperous banker? 
Most of us would be willing to stop there. 

And having ventured among the moderns, I 
may note that later evidences are strangely 
puzzling. John Burroughs and Doctor Mitchell 
may seem to touch the traditions. So do Barrie 
and Conrad and Galsworthy. Bliss Perry, 
Robert Frost, Brander Matthews and Hamlin 
Garland I have never hesitated to include in 
the group. Stevenson quite filled all reason- 
able expectations. Yeats runs true to form. 
But Kipling and Hardy and Hewlett we are 
likely at any moment to see designated merely 
as typifying what Henley, in the case of 
Thackeray, called "the gentlemanly interests." 
Photographers being as perverse as paragraph- 
ers, Chesterton's portraits often make him re- 
semble Dumas. Personal meeting brings con- 
tradiction, if not a sense of paradox. (I should 
like to have verified, in person, the extraordi- 
nary face of Nietzsche.) Chesterton has no 
more the traditional look than Hugh Walpole 
or Wells or Mencken. Unless there is to be a 
new standardization, I see no hope for anything 
better than one of those distressing descriptive 
evasions in the matter of Swinnerton, for ex- 
ample, or Dreiser or Tarkington or Huneker. 
5 53 



LOOKING LITERARY 

Of course there is always the chance that the 
lack is not of a "serene Olympian beauty," as 
in the case of Goethe, but of some one to say 
it — that these disenchanted times are deprived 
not only of make-up and stage properties and 
some reasonableness of lighting, but of the 
essential spectator reverence. There can be 
little satisfaction in looking literary if there is 
no one to notice — if there is no one even to 
think that impudent, "Excuse me, sir, but are 
you anybody in particular?" If the passion 
of curiosity that once led to dainty inquiries 
about quill pens and writing paper may seem 
to have been frustrated by habits of dictating 
to a nice girl with a white nose or of ecstatically 
tapping a type machine, and if asking for an 
authorial curl is made unthinkable by a cropped 
condition of the literary cranium, it would be 
fatuous to deduce too much from any coinci- 
dent situation. It is more than probable that 
there would be people to look literary — quite 
archaically literary — if there appeared to be 
anyone to enjoy it. Even "literary" writing 
is open to caustic suspicion. Perhaps one of 
the first effects of a genuine class consciousness 
in the literary is a wish to participate, to avoid 
being coddled as a parasitic class, to escape 
the sinister luxury of being kept. One might 
build up any sort of conclusion from such fan- 
tastic speculation — as that, for example, the 

54 



LOOKING LITERARY 

literary are in rebellion. To be in rebellion 
they ought to be different, and to be different 
they would have to be more like other people. 
And so on. 

Parallel considerations intrude upon any 
backward glance at the superstition as to the 
feminine literary type, a subject which I mod- 
estly avoid except for a parenthetical allusion. 
It is notorious that the feminine literary type 
was once traced by its clothes. Evidently tra- 
dition had furnished no other absurdity to go 
on. If the clothes were antiquated, particularly 
if they did not fit, the lady was literary. Short 
hair was the subject of remark; but short hair 
did not mean that she was literary. It meant 
simply that she was emancipated, which was 
quite another matter. Being emancipated 
could be established by saying so; whereas 
being literary involved objective testimony. 
Happily, these ribaldries are obsolete. Now 
that literary women are quite commonly fash- 
ionable (fancy a hobbled blue-stocking!), only 
a supreme audacity of analysis is likely to find 
courage or get a hearing. 

Indeed, one must feel that the whole question 
of looking literary takes on a delicate hazard. 
It may be that only a proper committee might 
determine the ethics and incidental subtleties of 
the situation. I could fancy such a committee 
(the chair reserving its ex-officio privileges). It 

55 



LOOKING LITERARY 

would consist, let us say, of Mr. Chesterton, 
Mr. Mencken, Miss Lowell, Mr. Dreiser, Mr. 
Hergesheimer, Mr. Gorky, and Mr. Lawrence 
(Mr. Cannan or Mr. Cabbell as alternate). 
Mr. Shaw I should exclude as one of those 
forward-looking reactionaries that are hard to 
adjust in a committee room. If the committee 
ridiculed its obligations we should gain some 
good stuff. If it arose fervently to the great 
opportunity, we should acquire a stabilizing 
codex. If we were told that for good and all 
we must abandon, as bad sociology, Hogarth's 
aspiration to "see the manners in the face," 
our duty would be plain. It would be equally 
plain if we were enjoined to regard a new and 
nicer formula of effect and of identification. 
Sentiment and Science would sit at the com- 
mittee-room door with a nervous patience until 
the verdict came. Literary History would be 
at a little distance, its robes jealously close, and 
displaying a cultivated and superior frown. 



THE TRUTH ABOUT WOMEN 



THE TRUTHS ABOUT WOMEN 

"TXTHEN I have one foot in the grave," 
YY said Tolstoy to Maxim Gorky, "I 
will tell the truth about women. I 
shall tell it, jump into my coffin, pull the lid 
over me, and say, 'Do what you like now." 
That the threat was not merely whimsical is 
more than suggested by Gorky's comment: 
"The look he gave us was so wild, so terrifying, 
that we all fell silent for a time." 

Gorky, who, on his own account, seldom 
gives us occasion to suspect him of being a 
postponing commentator, makes it plain enough 
in the narration of his talks with the awesome 
compatriot that Tolstoy was usually ready 
with the ultimate word, that he was willing 
to call a spade something just as bad. Yet in 
this matter of the truth about women there is 
the effect of pause before the unspeakable. 
We are, indeed, left with a feeling that, after 
saying so much about women in one way or 
another, Tolstoy, impatient of codes, excori- 
atingly contemptuous of trimmed opinion, 

59 



THE TRUTH ABOUT WOMEN 

tolerated the pressure of one reserve — that 
one complex was to be last to die. 

Any theory that his deferred analysis was 
simply something ungentlemanly is, of course, 
scarcely tenable, since he had been unquotably 
candid on many an occasion which seemed to 
establish clearly enough a fact of no reserve 
whatever. If he had been a devout feminist 
all his life, the last-moment declaration might 
have been, for example, a simple recantation, 
a leering or passionate confession of hatred 
long concealed, a defiance of all cowardly con- 
veniences. Having published his disenchant- 
ment, having grinned at the puerilities of 
romance, having stripped sex of its glamour, 
having rivaled St. Chrysostom in scathing 
description of the female, what could remain 
to be spilled at the brink of the grave? Cer- 
tainly that "terrifying" look could not promise 
anything sensationally sweet. 

Aside from the foolishness of planning for a 
one-foot-in-the-grave crisis, it is to be noted 
that even a Tolstoy would, with the best or 
worst of intentions, or the keenest of expecta- 
tions, find himself to be Tolstoy to the end. 
And being Tolstoy to the end, Tolstoy habits 
were likely to hold. 

A marked Tolstoy habit was that of promis- 
ing to be more violent if not more conclusive. 
Probably this habit is always likely to be 

60 



THE TRUTH ABOUT WOMEN 

present in those whose business is expression. 
The best that may be said will leave art in 
debt to the thought and the emotion. Only- 
one who is greater than anything he does is 
ever likely to do anything great. Thus margins 
of the unexpressed are inevitable. And what 
is true of the artist is doubtless true, in some 
degree, of all of us. Indeed, it is quite evident 
that it was not the artist side of Tolstoy that 
recognized, or lamented, or threatened as to 
things unspoken. The grizzled seer who raged 
before Gorky was starkly human in his ways, 
and was never more male than after he had 
long accustomed himself to maleness as a 
reminiscence, and to femaleness as a spectacle. 
Old age, even of the mellow kind, seldom fails 
to secrete some acrid distillation. A theory, a 
prejudice, a rebellion, can acquire in the fer- 
mentation of years a bitterness of savor that is 
often shockingly in contrast to perhaps con- 
spicuous urbanities which accompany them. 

Amid all such survivals sex hostilities pre- 
sent a sharp effect. Perhaps the effect is accen- 
tuated by fading signs of sex. We do not need 
the support of Mr. Freud to believe, for in- 
stance, that old maids of both sexes (for I 
speak of a state of mind) are often the most 
acrimonious critics of the drama of sex. Simple 
old age, whatever its history, naturally recruits 
the non-participating gallery, and we often 

61 



THE TRUTH ABOUT WOMEN 

have occasion to suspect the making of common 
cause between those who have always been 
aloof from the drama and those who are aloof 
at last — between irritated nonparticipants and 
disenchanted survivors. Naturally, too, a Tol- 
stoy, confessing a history, would claim to speak 
with special authority. A participant is always 
the more dogmatic. If he has seen the folly of 
a thing, he feels superior in authority to one 
who has only guessed it, or reasoned it, or has 
lacked the enterprise to reach the limits of 
folly. 

In this matter Tolstoy would have admitted 
or insisted that he knew what he was talking 
about. His disciples unite in revealing his 
definitive style of speech. Coleridge wished 
that he might be as sure of anything as Tom 
Macaulay was of everything. Gorky and the 
rest found that it was better to let Tolstoy 
keep the floor when he chose to take it. Johan 
Bojer said to me of a certain eminent British 
literary man he had met: "I wondered why he 
was so angry about things." Evidently one 
never wondered about Tolstoy. His angers 
had a sublimity. He could be Messianic, and 
he could slash like a Hebrew prophet. His 
denunciations were appalling. They were more 
likely to make his hearers "silent for a time" 
than to loosen contradictory talk; so that 
Gorky was following the practice in leaving as 

62 



THE TRUTH ABOUT WOMEN 

it fell this mystery of a promised last cry. Yet 
it would have been appropriate, I am sure, for 
some one to suggest that Tolstoy write the tre- 
mendous thing and leave it with his codicils, 
marked, "The Truth About Women." 

Men have always exhibited an anxiety as to 
this matter of the truth about women. Some- 
times the anxiety has shown in an eagerness 
to tell it themselves. Again it has appeared 
in the tone of their welcome to some one else's 
disclosure. The great thing, we might gather, 
was recognized as having the truth told some- 
how, this with the implication that the truth 
had hitherto been withheld, or perhaps merely 
mislaid. The very young or the very old have 
been most conspicuous in the field of revela- 
tion. Male creatures of, say, seventeen, have 
been known to acquire a sudden and abso- 
lutely conclusive insight into all womenkind. 
Beginning without bias, perhaps (and quite 
usually), with a special disposition of favor, 
these very young investigators have been 
known to emerge with a conviction of having 
been grossly deceived. No later sureness can 
hope quite to equal this first sureness. In its 
passion of resentment, in its squirming humil- 
iation at being fooled, in its bitter betrayal, as 
at the altar of all hope, adolescent conviction 
can reach a suicidal intensity. The soured 
adoration of a boy does not say, "You know 

63 



THE TRUTH ABOUT WOMEN 

how women are." In the midst of the cata- 
clysm a boy believes that no one hitherto has 
known how women are. He is the appointed 
Columbus on the sea of sex. 

Where the young cynic is indignant, the old 
cynic is progressively contemptuous. He per- 
haps recovered from that first indignation, and 
passed through a long mid-period of mature 
and judicial investigation. Then he knew. He 
has not merely a belief. He has a knowledge. 
In the presence of a cross section of feminine 
psychology, with all of its revolting revelatory 
detail, he intrenches himself at last in a settled 
exasperation or in a complacent disillusion- 
ment capable of sitting up, under challenge, 
to be witheringly final. The old cynic may 
have preferred, or may think he has preferred, 
the meek, "womanly" type. He may, on the 
other hand, have had a dream of a woman who 
would be not only easily inflammable, but 
gorgeously explosive, and of himself as carry- 
ing the only flame. He may have looked for 
violet eyes, or for some one named Iseult; for 
a woman superbly stupid or for one as sophisti- 
cated as a blonde stenographer. It does not 
matter, once he has reached the stage of well- 
ripened disappointment. He acquires a rich 
store of citations. He backs contemporary 
testimony with classical examples. He points 
to a hktory reeking with evidences of the awful 

64 



THE TRUTH ABOUT WOMEN 

truth about women. He is ready to indorse 
the report of the Preacher, who found one 
sought-for man among a thousand, "but a 
woman among all those have I not found." 

Possibly there was a time, in the youth of 
the world, when the truth about women was 
less a discovery, less something flashed in an 
apocalyptic moment, and more a brazen fact 
of common understanding. Yet this seems 
doubtful. Some truths are essentially of the 
hiding kind. It may be that men have intui- 
tively aided the hiding of this one. They have 
claimed as much. They have seemed to drape 
woman with what they have wished her to be, 
then exulted in tearing off the covering. They 
have set her up like a graven image, then hurled 
missiles at her because she did not answer 
their prayers. 

Literature is rich in anthologies of disen- 
chantment. As a subject, woman has been as 
necessary to pessimism as to romance. She 
has been the goddess, and she has been the 
goat. Cherchez la femme. Something has 
always been wrong with the world. Nothing 
could be clearer in the records than that it 
has been convenient to find woman as the 
explanation. If any era gets ready to decline 
and fall, track down the odor of musk. When 
a man or a civilization is "successful" there is 
a rush to woman. When there is failure, it is 

65 



THE TRUTH ABOUT WOMEN 

toward woman that the accusing finger is 
pointed. The Bible begins with the sad story 
of woman's culpability, and it ends with a 
scathing allegory that sets the image of her 
erring body in a high and horrible prominence. 
The devil is male, as befits his large functions, 
but no literature conceals his chief weapon. 
The sacrifice of the anchorite is an escape from 
women. The mind hates abstractions. Even 
the male mind, that alone is supposed to be 
capable of abstractions, has preferred to per- 
sonify. Having decided that angels are male, 
it fixed the images of Life and Death. For 
Temptation it made a digression. Woman is 
Temptation, vide Genesis and all the epics. 
Having envisaged Woman as Temptation, it 
has been easy, under the spell of antithesis, to 
envisage Man as the eternal St. Anthony, with 
the supreme preoccupation of not succumbing. 
He is the searcher for the Holy Grail. She is 
the vampire. He is pictured as persistently 
aspiring, she as persistently vamping. 

The truth about her, then, would be assumed 
to point toward unmasking some secret whose 
betrayal would destroy her power, or at least, 
and at last, fortify men against the danger. 
Man has felt compelled to go on marrying her 
and, by the promptings of a dogged optimism, 
even to go on pretending that she is what she 
ought to be. But he has always found some- 

66 



THE TRUTH ABOUT WOMEN 

thing pleasurable in confessing the pretense at 
the right moment; and he has never ceased to 
hope that the coming of the truth, something 
more than the superficial truth with which 
everybody is familiar — the penetrating, ulti- 
mate truth — might do its great work. In a 
large literature of exasperation there are count- 
less signs of a feeling that illusion should be 
dispelled for good and all; that, as in the mat- 
ter of some dog ordinance, women should be 
tied up, muzzled, or otherwise subjected to a 
safe restraint, and that the sex hitherto vic- 
timized should be educated to a new caution, 
a new severity, and especially to a new sense 
of custodian responsibility. 

This sense of a custodian responsibility 
doubtless explains much that has happened 
and much that has been said. A ruling that 
women shall not smoke in some place where 
men are freely permitted to smoke, is no more 
indicative of this sense of custodianship than 
ten thousand acts and opinions which have 
gone before. The past is littered with eloquent 
indications of man's intention to take care of 
women. His peculiar methods of taking care 
of them are often hard to read at a distance, 
but these methods have been steadfastly main- 
tained. The need to take care of them was 
predicated upon theories which he was at some 
trouble to invent. And he was continually 

67 



THE TRUTH ABOUT WOMEN 

forced to do fresh inventing, for new consid- 
erations came up. His ingenuity never waned. 
Even when social rearrangements introduced 
extraordinary complications, he was ready. He 
still worked on a basic premise. He was in 
charge. 

I knew a man who had not done any real 
work for twenty years. His wife was the wage 
earner. He let her add to this the cooking and 
the mending of his clothes. But he remained 
the head of the house, took her money, and 
made a tight allowance to her for lunches and 
carfare. He was not original or peculiar. He 
had the basic philosophy to go on. He was a 
perfect example of a tenacious tradition. Once 
the world had its formulas beautifully arranged. 

There came a time, however, when the basic 
philosophy began to look frayed. The whole 
theory of taking care of woman involved her 
occupying a "place," so that one who played 
the part of a showman exhibiting the world 
might be free to say that over there, in a cage, 
were the women. But the women broke out 
of the cage. They roved over the whole pic- 
ture. This made it exceedingly difficult to go 
on thinking about taking care of them. And 
conditions that made it difficult to take care 
of them made it not less difficult to know the 
truth about them. The first condition of tak- 
ing care of children, for example, is knowing 

68 



THE TRUTH ABOUT WOMEN 

just where they are. When women stopped 
knowing that their proper place is in the kitchen 
the trouble began. 

Then some one announced that there was a 
sex war. A sex war, like any other war, must 
have an original lie back of it. The original lie 
back of a sex war would be that the sexes are 
essentially antagonistic. There are people who 
believe that. Such a belief can breed a state 
of mind in which there arises a yearning to 
tell the truth about women. Some people have 
a passion for discovering antagonisms. They 
would like to build an inverted monism that 
revealed the universe as an extension of the 
Kilkenny cats. To tell them that the antag- 
onism was not in sex but in interests grow- 
ing out of sex, that these interests had been 
affected greatly by a one-sided pressure, and 
that they were subject to change with world 
change, would be to take away a certain com- 
fortable misery. Moreover, it would to an 
awkward extent interfere with, or, at all 
events, take some of the zest from the attain- 
ment of that great ideal of revealing the truth 
about women. 

The tendency to believe that there is a 
special and sinister "truth" about women, in 
whatever types of mind it may appear, and at 
whichever stage of age or youth it may mani- 
fest itself, was nourished by conditions that 
6 69 



THE TRUTH ABOUT WOMEN 

quite plainly have begun to disappear. No 
supplanting conditions can be quite so favor- 
able to a successful attitude of male super- 
vision or privileged male analysis. Woman- 
kind will never again be an incidental element 
of mankind. As civilization advances it will 
grow harder to indicate women as representing 
one of the minor appointments, harder to think 
of them as a creature group. They have 
smashed the tradition of "place." They have 
overrun the forbidden industries and profes- 
sions. They are doing all the things they are 
unfitted for. They occupy judgeships. They 
sit in legislatures. They have accepted fusion 
in the melting pot of world effort. 

This ought to prove, I suppose, that the 
truth about women must now be much more 
complicated than it used to be. It ought to 
prove that a vision of the truth about women 
must become a vastly more subtle matter. It 
might turn out to be a more annoying truth 
than it ever was before. Yet there is a better 
hope. If maleness can no longer be put on one 
side of the picture, and f emaleness on the other, 
where each group may glare at and accuse the 
other; if the blending of effort in affairs means 
anything; if there is any wisdom in saying 
that there is no sex in science or in art; if re- 
ligion may revise its bisecting dogmas; if 
women themselves may join the preachers and 

70 



THE TRUTH ABOUT WOMEN 

prophets, the obliterations must do something 
to traditions of antipathy, must at some point 
begin to suggest, even to stodgy or senile 
minds, the oneness of mankind. 

A new Tolstoy who should threaten that, 
when he had one foot in the grave, he would 
tell the truth about humanity, would not be 
credited with a superior impudence. He would 
be credited with an inferior humor. The notion 
of a separable truth about women will begin 
to wear the same complexion. The real truth 
about women will be known when the real 
truth about men is known. To have read one 
will be to have read the other. The aspiration 
to do the reading will always be praiseworthy. 
Such an aspiration is indeed inevitable. It has 
always existed. It has always been defeated. 
But it would be a misfortune if frustration 
enfeebled the wish. This supreme curiosity is 
indicative of mankind's desire to be a partici- 
pating creator. So long as man wants to know, 
his power will increase. If he ever really knows, 
he may be awed. He may indeed find the truth 
terrifying. Yet he will by then have lost some 
of his fears, perhaps even his fear of women 
and of words. 



BIBLIA PAUPERUM 



BIBLIA PAUPERUM 

IN a supreme court trial room I saw that 
the tattered covers of the Bible were loos- 
ened, and that against the calamity of its 
complete dismemberment the book was tied, in 
the manner of a package, with a thick string, 
this way and that. One is accustomed to note 
that the state does many things shabbily, yet 
this was a spectacle of a special shabbiness. 
The robe of the supreme court judge was de- 
cently whole. The garment of the supreme word 
was in rags. As so much symbolism the situa- 
tion was provocative. Even amid the many 
ironies of a court room this irony stood forth. 
It stood forth because one could not let it 
escape as merely an irony to be accepted with 
the other tarnished stage settings of a tribunal. 
It threatened to be comic, and thus to approach 
the supreme impudence. And it stood forth 
also for something pathetic that belonged not 
to the book, but to the perfunctory and rather 
sodden performance in which the object glim- 
mered now and then. 

The scene and its grotesque feature carried 
75 



BIBLIA PAUPERUM 

me back a good many years, to the time when 
I was a court clerk, expert in hieroglyphs for 
purposes of record, and my judge brought in 
a new Bible, wrapped in his morning paper. 
At the coming of the new book I begged for 
possession of the old one. The judge looked at 
me narrowly, as he looked on the day when I 
hunted the passage from Isaiah for the de- 
fendant's counsel in the larceny case, and 
remarked that I was quite welcome. 

And now the venerable volume lies before me, 
cum privilegio, its tattered dignity illuminated 
by the softening light of reminiscence; a fat 
little book, born at Blackfriars, its leather coat 
shining like a smith's apron, its "full gilt" 
dulled to a mellow bronze. 

For ten years I had watched them salute it 
— petitioners and paupers, "hard" criminals, 
children propped to the bar, bent old men, 
women who winced and interposed their gloved 
fingers, clergymen who raised it solemnly, 
gamblers who grinned and shifted their to- 
bacco to the other side, strange peddlers who 
made a revolting noise. 

In the first place it had seemed by precedent 
to be kissed on the flat of the cover. I fancy 
this was the form in the days when, as in the 
phrase of Scott's jailer, they "smacked calf- 
skin" at the old Scottish courts, and were 
bidden "the truth to tell, and no truth to 

76 



BIBLIA PAUPERUM 

conceal ... in the name of God, and as the 
witness should answer to God on the great 
day of judgment" — "an awful adjuration," 
says the chronicler of Effie Deans's trial, 
"which seldom fails to make impression even 
on the most hardened characters, and to strike 
with fear even the most upright." In those 
days the witness was called upon to repeat the 
words of the oath, a form which must greatly 
have increased its solemnity and have deep- 
ened the difficulty of maintaining those mental 
reservations more readily associated with an 
often flippant nod of the head and a perfunctory 
touch. 

Doubtless it was some sense, aesthetic or 
sanitary, of the accretions of time which led 
the court officers who controlled the fortunes 
of my Bible to form a practice of holding to 
the witnesses' lips the gilded edge of the vol- 
ume, and in the latter days of its service the 
officer, if the witness were a woman, and par- 
ticularly if she were a pretty woman, would 
invidiously open the book and offer her the 
relatively unfrequented space of a random 
page. 

It had been kissed by juries, the men first 
standing in a circle with hands outstretched 
toward it, the officer then thrusting it, some- 
times with grotesque ineptness, into one face 
after the other. Frequently it had been lost 

77 



BIBLIA PAUPERUM 

for definite minutes, until the cry went up in 
the court, " Where's the Bible? " On more than 
one such occasion the judge indulged in an old 
jest: "The stenographer's very fond of it. 
Search him." This was because it once had 
been found under my elbow after a prosy open- 
ing argument by counsel. 

The spectacle of my absorption in the book 
during a summing up sometimes seemed to 
amuse the judge, who reserved the right to read 
a newspaper throughout a pathetic passage by 
the lawyer for the defense. At one time he ap- 
peared to feel that I was covertly preparing 
for the ministry, or that my voluminous notes 
not demanded by the procedure of the court 
were designed to further the ends of some 
fanatical reform. 

I was testimony clerk during the incumbency 
of this Bible, and sat upon the right hand of the 
judicial chair in a bare justice's court, on the 
side near the witness stand, the Bible on the 
ledge before me. The Bible was the beginning 
of everything. The complainant, police officer 
or civilian, saluted it after signing the com- 
plaint. The special interpreter, Slav, Hindu, 
or Chinese, impartially took oath upon it before 
in turn swearing the witness. When the wit- 
ness was a Hebrew it frequently happened that 
the book was opened so that he might place his 
hand upon the Old Testament section, and he 

78 



BIBLIA PAUPERUM 

was permitted, and sometimes directed, to wear 
his hat for the space of the ritual. 

During the ten years of my observation the 
practice of affirming with uplifted hand, in 
preference to the older form of oath, steadily 
grew. The choice to affirm was generally 
accepted without comment, though I can re- 
member that at a not remotely earlier day the 
affirmant usually underwent interrogation as 
to his reasons for eschewing the oath, his atti- 
tude toward the Bible, his belief in a supreme 
being, and his sense of obligation as related 
to the affirmation. These forms are supposed 
to be duly regulated by statute, but in fact 
they vary, and vastly, within statutory areas. 

The entrance of a child complainant or wit- 
ness often introduced a curious scene. Elicit- 
ing facts from the mouths of babes is a dubious 
business in any circumstances. In the shabby 
witness box of a justice's court it is often pain- 
ful enough, not least so, perhaps, when it is 
superficially amusing. My notes show many 
strange answers from the bewildered youngsters 
called to exploit psychology before a hetero- 
geneous audience. 

I can see the judge leaning forward and ask- 
ing in his most reassuring tone, "Now, little 
boy, do you know what it is to swear?" 

The Boy: "I know that I mustn't swear." 

The Judge: "I mean to swear on the Bible." 
79 



BIBLIA PAUPEEUM 

The Boy: "I know that it's very wrong." 

The Judge: "No, it isn't wrong to swear on 
the Bible. But let me ask you, do you know 
what will become of you if you tell a lie?" 

The Boy: "I will die." 

The Judge: "And what else?" 

The Boy: "Go to hell." 

It was at this juncture that the lawyer who 
offered the child as a witness was likely to inter- 
pose by saying, "I submit, Your Honor, that 
the witness is entirely competent," and per- 
haps some feeling that the fear of hell is the 
beginning of wisdom would influence the 
acceptance of the child's testimony, the court 
shamefacedly watching the innocent lips pucker 
over the book. Indeed, the familiar procedure 
seemed to go upon the assumption that noth- 
ing else was to be done. 

On another occasion: 

The Judge: "What will happen to you if 
you swear to tell the truth and then tell a lie?" 

The Boy: "I will be punished." 

The Judge: "By whom?" 

The Boy: "By the judge." 

The Judge: "Anybody else?" 

The Boy: "The policeman." 

The Judge: "Who else?" 

The Boy: "The jail man." 

The Judge {gravely): "Will no one else pun- 
ish you?" 

80 



BIBLIA PAUPERUM 

The Boy (brightening): "Oh, yes, my 
mother." 

Not infrequently the young witness would 
reply with great promptness, giving sign of 
precautionary instruction, as for example: 

The Judge: "What will become of you if 
you tell what isn't true?" 

The Boy: "God won't like me and I will go 
to the bad place." 

That the solemnity of the oath to tell the 
truth and nothing but the truth remained well 
forward in the mind of the witness was often 
indicated in the phraseology of the testimony. 
An indignant witness, questioned too point- 
edly as to his sincerity, cries out, "What did 
I kiss the book for?" 

"You swear that?" demands the lawyer of 
an irritatingly specific witness. 

"Yes, sir, on a thousand Bibles!" 

It was a commonplace of the minor trials, in 
the midst of a witness's recital, to hear a sad- 
dened voice from the benches, "An' you just 
after kissin' the Book of God!" Nothing could 
have been more dramatic than the interruption 
of an aged defendant, a lank Irishwoman, who 
leveled a bony finger at the witness and de- 
clared in a deep, anguished tone, "God is lis- 
tenin' to your discoorse!" And, the interrup- 
tions having been many, the judge added: "So 
am I, madam. Sit down." 

81 



BIBLIA PAUPERUM 

It was a trick of spectacular witnesses to use 
the Bible as a means of completing an illustra- 
tion as to how certain objects were disposed, 
and, when it was availably near, a witness was 
likely to pick up the book to indicate the man- 
ner in which some missile had been thrown. 
Of the average witnesses it may be said that his 
habit toward the little black volume was 
quickly and continuously reverential. Many 
reached for it as a means of emphasizing their 
integrity by ostentatiously holding it in their 
hands. 

I recall the figure of a white-haired man who 
stood straight and solemn, with his hand upon 
the book. "I want to say," he began, "to the 
judge and you gentlemen around here — " 

"Oh, never mind us gentlemen," interrupted 
the opposing counsel; "say it to the judge." 

It is, of course, the business of the opposing 
counsel to belittle the witness in his greatest 
moment, but nothing of this sort has ever 
seemed to me more brutal than an incident in 
dispossess proceedings, when a little, old- 
fashioned, white-faced woman, stretching forth 
her hand, said, with gentle fervor, "Judge, this 
good book tells us — " And the landlord's 
attorney, breaking in with a rasping voice, 
snarled, "Madam, we haven't asked you to 
interpret the Scriptures. Do you owe this rent 
or not?" The woman mutely turned her face 

82 



BIBLIA PAUPERUM 

to the lawyer, and her sob brought a moment 
so intense that the judge, his eyes moistening, 
lowered the gavel with a bang and ordered the 
crowd in the back to be quiet, though there 
was not a sound there. 

On another morning an old man, under stress 
of a harsh cross-examination, caught up the 
book and with incredible quickness opened it 
at Proverbs. "You find fault!" he cried, ex- 
tending a shaking finger to the text. "Read 
that!" And the lawyer, fascinated by the un- 
expectedness of the challenge, actually read 
aloud, "Answer a fool according to his folly." 

The book, lying here aloof from the turmoil 
of its one-time surroundings, evokes scene after 
scene of this kind. I see it under the hands of 
trembling women who totter in the crisis. I 
see it grasped by eager and pugnacious veter- 
ans in discord who pant for the excitements of 
the trial. I see it in the hand of the judge, 
himself administering the oath to a witness 
from whom, in a great perplexity, he asks the 
very essence of truth. I see it suspended while 
the accused, at the brink of a trial, debates 
with his counsel a plea of guilty. I see it hur- 
riedly restored to its accustomed place when the 
accused, about to take the oath, has fallen in 
a heap, and there is a call for water and the 
doctor. 

One March day a fragile girl bearing a very 
83 



BIBLIA PAUPERUM 

young infant, with an accusatory gesture, 
stepped to the stand, keeping her eyes away 
from a pale young man who sat in the prisoner's 
chair. He was a mere boy. His mother and 
a lawyer sat on either side of him. His look 
was half dogged, half frightened, and he never 
took his eyes away from the face of the girl. 
The little mother at the bar had just kissed the 
book and was adjusting herself in the witness 
chair, when she gave a startled scream which 
no one who heard it is likely ever to forget. 

The baby had died in her arms. My recol- 
lection gives me a confused picture in which I 
see the pale-faced young man pulling aside the 
wrappings of the baby ; and I hear the later for- 
mula of the judge, in which there was "charge 
upon the county" and "case dismissed." 

I remember another day when a fragile old 
man was arraigned upon a charge of theft in 
a business house. The charge was a mistake, 
and this soon appeared. Throughout the hear- 
ing the man himself had been singularly quiet 
and dignified. But his wife, a Quakerish little 
woman, pale and set, watched and listened 
with an anxiety painful to see. When the judge 
dismissed the charge, with some regretful word 
for the injustice of its having been made, the 
woman arose and kissed her husband. Then 
she came forward, lifted the Bible, and trem- 
blingly touched the cover with her lips. 

84 



"THE LAST OF THE GREAT 



"THE LAST OF THE GREAT 



99 



WHEN it seems essential to clinch a con- 
tention that the world is going to the 
bad, nothing is more effective than the 
pointing out that the last of the great in some 
field has just passed beyond. A feeling of 
apprehension and even of desolation may some- 
times be induced by some general picture if 
the picture is drawn with sufficient violence, 
but the simple announcement that "the last 
of the great" painters or actors or statesmen 
or historians has just slipped away stirs a sense 
of being left high and dry in an arid wilderness 
of a world. No other trick can effectively rival 
this one. If there are no more great, all argu- 
ment is ended. The earlier time that produced 
the great is logically exalted. Inferentially, it 
had the punch. 

The departure of the great is sometimes cited 
not merely as offering reminder of the desola- 
tion that remains, but with the effect of sug- 
gesting that the great are going in disgust. 
When the great, and specifically this last one 
of them, looks for his hat, hospitality may well 

87 



"THE LAST OF THE GREAT" 

seem to be scathingly accused. There is an 
implication that somebody should feel ashamed. 

Usually somebody does, and asks why more 
greatness hasn't been provided. If there is a 
greatness shortage, something should be done 
about it, preferably at once. 

In the average case, I fancy, there is a tend- 
ency to conclude that our present inferiority, 
established by that word "last," may not of 
necessity be final; that things may look up 
later on. You never can tell. When some one 
says, "There used to be Wagner, and now we 
have Sousa," when a month of America is 
compared with a cycle of Europe, the absurdity 
usually escapes challenge under the spell of 
the formula, and the common expedient is to 
plead for mercy upon the interval. 

I recall the startled realization that came in 
first reading Plato's reverent reference to "the 
ancients." There were, I soon discovered, no 
ancients who did not look back toward other 
ancients. There was also, among those who 
looked back, from a time however remote, a 
disposition to believe that "there were giants 
in those days." The whole phenomenon of 
ancestor worship carries its implications of a 
satisfaction in this belief, but the tradition has 
always gone further. Races have enjoyed the 
notion of being importantly derived. Individ- 
ual men may have been willing, like Congreve, 

88 



"THE LAST OF THE GREAT" 

to say, "I came upstairs into the world, for I 
was born in a cellar," but races are less com- 
fortable, it would seem, in parading a humble 
origin. Descent from the big has had a supe- 
rior appeal to the imagination. Perhaps this 
accounted for much of the rage against Darwin. 
To be comfortably settled with family portraits 
of people who came over with the Conqueror 
or in the Mayflower, and then to hear an up- 
start talk about antecedent hairy ones — well, it 
was too much. Neither Darwin's "exploded" 
evolution or any other sort will ever make 
ascent as popular as descent. We seem to 
prefer to have come down rather than to have 
come up. Logic and pride may give us satis- 
faction in a great descendant, yet this glory at 
its best seems never to attain the utterly com- 
placent ecstasy of having a great ancestor. 
For one thing, a descendant is still a responsi- 
bility, while an ancestor is finished. The past 
has the security of its perspective. 

Carlyle found in this security an explanation 
for any habit of regarding the past as beauti- 
ful. He points out, as to the past, that "the 
element of fear is withdrawn from it"; it is 
safe, "while the present and future are so dan- 
gerous." It is circumstantially true that many 
persons elect to live in a more comfortable 
past, and mentally inhabit to the end a period 
that was, of course, much less comfortable to 

89 



"THE LAST OF THE GREAT" 

those who literally lived it. Jealousy of the 
past is, after all, a rare sort of subtlety. Jeal- 
ousy of the present is a commonplace. At the 
great pause the voice of jealousy drops to a 
whisper. Living, your man is an obstacle, an 
intrusion, a problem; dead, he can be no worse 
than a moral force. Living, he is a politician; 
dead, we can afford to let him be a statesman. 
Living, he is a scribbler; dead, he is an author. 
Incidentally, to call him great when he is dead 
is one way of impressing the living. To call 
him the last of the great is to put the obstrep- 
erous living quite where they belong. 

The rebuke, made most dramatic by the con- 
crete example of the disappearing last one, is 
reflective of a castigating attitude of mind that 
is very old, but has to believe itself new to 
keep its energy. The answer of Mark Lemon 
is classic. When some one said, "Punch isn't 
so good as it used to be," Lemon was prompt. 
"It never was," he said. Castigation is seldom 
strong in its perspectives. The appetite for 
Punch, like the appetite for pie, may have a 
good memory, but a bad historical sense. The 
pie mother used to make established its quali- 
ties in a young stomach. That "old-fashioned 
snowstorm" measured high on young legs. 
The orator we heard in boyhood was the real 
thing. He lifted us out of our seat. Can this 
new-fangled speechifier do that? That adven- 

90 



"THE LAST OF THE GREAT" 

ture story kept our boy eyes staringly awake 
until sunrise; at forty we pick up one of these 
modern pretenders, without a trace of bigotry, 
impartially eager, in fact, to give a fair hear- 
ing. And what happens? We are asleep before 
the first chapter is finished. How can you 
compare a romancer who puts you to sleep 
with one who kept you awake all night? Yes, 
there were giants in those days. 

Philip Hone, once mayor of the city of New 
York, having returned to private life, attended 
a mayor's reception on New Year's Day, 1837. 
When he came home he wrote in his diary, 
"The manners as well as the times have sadly 
changed." "Sadly" changed, you observe. 
Change persistently contrives to be "sad." 
Don't take my word. Go thou to the records. 

Scan London in the seventeen-nineties, when 
the last of the great were departing with abso- 
lutely panicky results. The decent, the de- 
corous, the distinguished were disappearing. 
Manners were, of course, "sadly changing." 
Cropping the hair was regarded as a prodigious 
affectation. Cutting off coat tails was worse. 
The Earl of Spencer's jacket was remarked as 
"a humiliating fashion," and you may be 
assured that women's dress was disapproved 
as equivocal, if not licentious. Bare shoulders 
had been forbidden in Italy. Great Britain got 
out a yardstick for skirts. History is, of course, 

91 



"THE LAST OF THE GREAT" 

full of the expedients of collective modesty. 
Government suggestion was always an abomi- 
nable interference, and always as if interfering 
had just begun. Recent American efforts to 
regulate the height of heels recalls the statute 
under Edward III that forbade anybody under 
the rank of knight to wear pointed shoes meas- 
uring "more than four inches beyond the 
natural extremity." (Some one should devote 
a tome to "the natural extremity." The social 
and spiritual parallels to the natural extremity 
— best minds to fix that delicate point of the 
natural, so definitely measurable in the case of 
feet — offer a theme of extraordinary suggestive- 
ness. There is only one other word that reeks 
with so much fun as "natural." That word, of 
course, is "normal.") 

As you will have suspected, the London 
Times was ready to say, "It would not be easily 
believed by our great-grandmothers." The 
last of the great-grandmothers said it before 
she went. Horror — that was her state of mind. 
It did not matter that this happened to be in 
the seven teen-nineties. How perfectly these 
words would have fitted any period down to 
last week: "Tell a servant now [1795], in the 
mildest manner, they have not done their work 
to please you, and you are told to provide for 
yourself." And, wages having gone up to 
five dollars a month: "I look upon their exorbi- 

92 



"THE LAST OF THE GREAT" 

tant increase of wages as chiefly conducive to 
their impertinence." Although any doctrine of 
original sin should have prepared us, it is never- 
theless disenchanting to discover, as with orig- 
inal jokes, that the past spoiled many of our 
opportunities for fresh wickedness. There in 
the twilight of the eighteenth century, "Take 
care of your pockets!" was a "usual cry" in 
the lobby of the theater; it was indicative of 
a calamitous decline that the Prince of Wales 
should go to a prize-fight; impatient protest 
made it increasingly plain that there were too 
many lawyers; and as for politics, what could 
have inflicted a deeper pain on the last of the 
great than the open sale of public office? "Five 
hundred pounds," read one advertisement 
(1779), "will be given to any Lady or Gentle- 
man who can procure the Advertiser a Place 
under Government where the emoluments will 
be liberal compensation for the sum proposed, 
and but little attendance required." 

Could anything be more affronting to our 
sense of originality than that casual fling, "but 
little attendance required"? Have we been 
surer of anything than of inventing political 
short change? Can it be true that Charles 
Lamb was not joking when he said, in the mat- 
ter of his public job, that if he came late, he 
squared himself by going away early? 

Writing men have, indeed, not only seemed 
93 



"THE LAST OF THE GREAT" 

from the beginning to be fearfully human in 
conduct, but they have been quite as ready as 
the average wayfarer to "view with alarm." 
They have always seen changes as "sad." 
Huysmans's bitter phrase, "our vile time," has 
a classic adjustability. Long before Sir David 
Lindsay they had begun considering "the 
miserabyll estait of the world," frequently as 
if Mr. Maesfield might be right in discerning 
the exultation of "a delighted brooding on ex- 
cessively terrible things." "Our whole sys- 
tem," said Alfred Henry Wallace, "is rotten 
from top to bottom." Decay — that is the 
point of emphasis ; we have always been degen- 
erates. No wonder, then, that Wallace could 
find that "our social environment is the worst 
the world has ever seen." He could believe 
in evolution, but he did not escape the 
frailty of believing that his humanity had 
slipped back. The cry of Felix Adler before 
the Great War that "we are living in a time 
of moral chaos" is but a paraphrase of things 
said with the same vehemence by Seneca and 
Marcus Aurelius. Doctor Eliot finds "a quite 
general coarsening of manners." Paul and 
Chesterfield made the same discovery. Balzac 
was sure that there was no longer a nobility, 
but only an aristocracy. Scott was not with- 
out hope, but he seems to have been sure 
of the contemporary slump. "When the taste 

94 



"THE LAST OF THE GREAT" 

for simplicity," he says, "is once destroyed, 
it is long ere a nation recovers it." Ruskin, 
of course, was violently resentful of his time. 
"It is simply and sternly impossible," he 
declared with a caustic gesture, "for the 
English public, at this moment, to under- 
stand any thoughtful writing." Even the ur- 
banity of Renan yielded to the human habit. 
There is a pathos in his way of remarking, 
"People understood this forty years ago"; 
that is to say, forty years ago, in the good days 
of the old-fashioned snowstorms. You may be 
assured that Carlyle was not without positive 
consciousness of a depressing plight for the 
immediate generation. "Alas!" he mutters, 
"the age of substance and solidity is gone for 
the time; that of show and hollow superfi- 
ciality — in all senses — is in full swing." 

"Gone for the time" is a perennial. Each 
generation is sure that it has a copyright for 
"superficiality." Robert Grant's lament of 
to-day's "easy-going optimism," and of the 
way "standards are swept away" by mal- 
contents with a "smattering," touches the same 
note, though Judge Grant can be ironical about 
the tired business man without a trace of any 
traditional despair. American complacency is 
his mark, just as American smugness is the 
mark of Theodore Dreiser when he maintains, 
in a certain stalwart document tingling with 

95 



"THE LAST OF THE GREAT" 

controlled wrath, that "our ignorance is ap- 
palling," that "in the main we are unbeliev- 
ably dull and wishy-washy." 

Mr. Dreiser's arraignment of American col- 
leges is a reminder of the antiquity of scholastic 
perverseness. If Lady Mary Montagu thought 
her education "one of the worst in the world," 
so have most British geniuses before and since 
her time, frequently with the effect of fortify- 
ing Jeremiah in his pronouncement that "ye 
have done worse than your fathers." Carlyle 
has another "Alas!" to fit the case: "Such is 
the miseducation of these days!" Half a cen- 
tury later Mrs. Gerould cries, "How in such an 
age can culture flourish?" When Agnes Rep- 
plier sees disaster in "letting down the walls of 
human resistance" by offering as play what 
should be stern school work, so that the ele- 
ments of education might be absorbed "with- 
out conscious effort, and certainly without 
compulsion," she is but echoing a misgiving 
that has taunted instruction since the caveman 
parent was first admonished not to spare the 
club. You may pick up traces of this misgiving 
in any century. "I have ever found it a vain 
task," said Oliver Goldsmith, "to make a child's 
learning its amusement; nor do I see what good 
end it would answer were it actually attained." 

Poor old education! In a day when it was 
hard, Montaigne could emerge from college 

96 



"THE LAST OF THE GREAT" 

with the anathema that he had brought noth- 
ing away "but a hate and contempt for books." 
At each sign of a softening there has been the 
warning cry to "Treat 'em rough!" and ever, 
at each step of the way, there has come the 
voice, like that of John Butler Yeats (though 
he is no pessimist), to murmur dejectedly, "Yet 
we wonder that the world no longer produces 
distinguished personalities." 

Probably Mr. Yeats would have called Henry 
Adams a distinguished personality, yet Henry 
Adams himself was as disappointed at the be- 
ginning as at the end. Adams, who often gives 
the impression that, like the tagged dog in the 
baggage car, he "chewed up where he was 
going," and would have us believe that he 
never did get anywhere except into the book 
where ultimately we find him, might have 
called his book by Edgar Saltus's title, The 
Philosophy of Disenchantment. Adams's trouble 
was that he was too much a descendant. If he 
had been busy as an ancestor, with concrete 
responsibilities as to some one else's education, 
he might have had less time to despair. 

It is needless to indicate that art has not only 
always been dying, but that in each season it 
has just died, leaving a gray waste behind it. 
No class of critic seems to have escaped the 
automatic influence of years. As an example 
of this influence, take the same Montaigne, 

97 



"THE LAST OF THE GREAT" 

who began with a repulsion, with no reverence 
at all, but who did not escape the age-old and 
old-age habit. "I am not greatly affected to 
new books," he says, "because ancient authors, 
to my judgment, are more full and pithy." It 
is only new books that give us the scalding 
phrase, "modern trash." Who ever heard of 
"ancient trash"? Our scorn of the contempo- 
rary output is nourished, doubtless, by the 
common feeling that an indifference toward 
the arts has just happened. "To-day," said 
Rodin, "mankind believes itself able to do 
without art." To-day is mercenary. To-day 
men paint for money, accept checks for their 
poems. Who can associate filthy symbols with 
the creator of a Madonna? The Greeks, the 
Romans, the men of Italy's golden age, are 
assumed to have labored under a high emotion 
that somehow left them free from economic 
pressure. To suggest a Michelangelo driving a 
bargain or a Rembrandt truckling for an order 
would be not only sacrilegious inculpation 
as to these divinities, but insultingly disturb- 
ing to the notion that the advent of a mer- 
cenary period persuaded the last of the great to 
take himself off. The theory that men used to 
write and paint and carve and build under im- 
pulses of pure devotion has in it, I am sure, 
something good, however mistaken it may be. 
An earnest woman once asked me whether 
98 



"THE LAST OF THE; GREAT" 

I thought Lot's wife had really had a square 
deal. I felt forced to admit that Mrs. Lot 
appeared to have been a victim of that dis- 
proportion in punishments which is equaled 
only by the disproportions of popular glory. 
Larger bearings became apparent. The truth 
is that only those who look backward can wisely 
look forward. False deductions from the back- 
ward look are the basic calamity. The Preacher 
apprehended the danger. "Say not thou," we 
are warned, "What is the cause that the former 
days were better than these? for thou dost not 
enquire wisely concerning this." Science sup- 
ports Ecclesiastes. When Huxley sums up our 
knowledge of the ethnological past of man, he 
finds that "so far as the light is bright, it shows 
him substantially as he is now; and, when it 
grows dim, it permits us to see no sign that he 
was other than he is now." 

Certainly H. G. Wells is here, as often else- 
where, incorrigibly a modern Preacher. He 
has excellently belabored those who have not 
"enquired wisely." He has said his say about 
the giants of "those days." He has taken 
mighty pains to prove how the long ascent of 
the past "gives the lie to our despair." He 
demands a place among those who cannot be 
fooled about "the last of the great." Inci- 
dentally, he has strikingly fortified the truth 
that no history ever was or ever can be other 

99 



"THE LAST OF THE GREAT" 

than opinion. Reading history for "facts" is 
not only a prodigious, but a pernicious, delu- 
sion. Each of us may be and must be his own 
historian. Each of us must find his own way 
of not being fooled. If we are lucky, we shall 
be able to do this without belittling either the 
big of the past or the big of the present. We 
shall see, for one thing, that if each era has 
been able to apostrophize the last of the great, 
the great must always have been present. If 
the great, like the poor, are always with us, we 
need not despair, though we may choose to 
reserve all of our rights in the quarrel as to 
their identity. We may learn to measure 
movements and peoples as well as individual 
men with some glimmering of proportion. We 
shall perhaps learn to greet as well as to bury, 
learn to encourage by high expectation as well 
as to commiserate in postmortem tears. Hav- 
ing learned to accept all report of the past as 
so much opinion, and thus to have acquired 
the privilege of occupying it ourselves, we shall 
be the better prepared to consider the present 
as ever subject to our individual measure. If 
a Strindberg, in agony or in petulance, speaks 
of "that madhouse, that jail, that morgue, the 
earth," we may be reminded of his right to a 
personal opinion. 

In the end we may come to realize that a 
consciousness of the strategic as well as the 

100 



"THE LAST OF THE GREAT" 

stupid quality in the phrase titling these re- 
marks may have a practical usefulness in the 
presence of any stodgy contemporary criticism. 
That static criticism which finds its nourish- 
ment and its dogmas in the past, as distin- 
guished from the dynamic criticism which is 
fed by the blood of the present, has the advan- 
tage of seasoned formulae. It knows the effects 
of fear. It knows that a humanity born in sin 
is self -distrustful. It knows the mesmeric force 
of the accusing finger and the bitter word. It 
knows the witch-doctor trick at the funeral 
pyre. To the moribund formalist death is an 
eternal text, reinforcing to every theory that 
we live in a rotten time. To the creative critic, 
young or old in years, but eagerly alive, with a 
passion of belief in the immutable processes, it 
is birth that stirs the pulse of prophecy; it is 
the unfolding of genius rather than its wither- 
ing that kindles concern; it is the living sign 
rather than the graveyard symbol that stirs to 
action and warms the cockles of a provocative 
expectation. The creative critic will fall into 
no frenzy of lament over the great dead, be- 
cause his homage will not have waited for death. 
He will have kept his judgment books in bal- 
ance. He will have appraised the forces of his 
time not in terms of age any more than in like- 
nesses to tradition, but by the high measure of 
a patient faith. 
8 101 



HALF GODS AND THE GODDESS 



i 



HALF GODS AND THE 
GODDESS 

MARY AUSTIN has candidly pointed out 
a significant situation in American intel- 
lectual life. This implacable feminist re- 
minds us that while Europe's culture has always 
been androcentric it is always " tempered and 
mellowed by the wisdom of mature women." 
In America the situation is different. "The 
ancient tribal usage which holds the older men 
should rule while younger men adventure, 
mature women mediate between them and 
young women be husbanded, has given place 
to a system of isolated groups which have 
almost the force of caste." Conspicuous among 
the isolated groups is that of our young men 
thinkers, who seem to themselves, by Mrs. 
Austin's analysis, "the sole apostles of Ameri- 
can culture." The sharp arraignment adds: 
"One can imagine that the future, looking back 
on our time, will see this schism between young 
men and mature women as the greatest singu- 
larity of our bisexual organization." 

Without exonerating "our so-called intellect- 
105 



HALF GODS AND THE GODDESS 

uals," who would not be intellectuals if they 
were without assurance, and who cannot be 
blamed for being young, Mrs. Austin sees one 
explanation for an anomalous and hampering 
phase in the fact that women are less ritualistic 
than men. There is no difficulty in showing 
that in sheer culture women have attained a 
full partner status; that in the sciences, for 
example, they work side by side, and in a 
soundly equipped equality, with the men of 
their time; but their failures of deference to 
form, their deficiencies in the formulas of ex- 
pression, have prevented a natural participa- 
tion with "the smaller, more ritualistic groups 
of men thinkers." This is equivalent to saying 
that their religions may be good enough but 
that their theologies are inferior. And since 
men are left to establish ritual, women are left 
to reach intellectual exchange through media 
fixed and controlled by men — through maga- 
zines edited by men, for example. 

The anomaly is indicated not by the exist- 
ence of this particular divergence in the mental 
habits of men and women, for that divergence 
has always existed; it is reached in the changed 
proportions of the groups. All that is expressed 
by the word culture is represented to-day by a 
group of women larger than the corresponding 
group of men. It is the commonplace to yield 
to women the custodianship of culture. Women 

106 



HALF GODS AND THE GODDESS 

apply culture; the smaller group persists in 
demarcating it. Art may seem to say, Let me 
create culture and I will not ask who lives it. 

Of course those who arrogate code will expect 
to lead. "Form" is as characteristic of politics 
as of painting. Since art is not merely expres- 
sion, but communication, the masters of art 
must be masters of contact, and it is easy to 
build up beautiful sophistries in support of the 
ritualism which thus holds itself to be vastly 
important. The worst of it is that ritualism 
reaches the point where contact quite disap- 
pears from its thought, and we face the paradox 
that those who see, and who feel intensely, but 
who forget formula, are more eager for influen- 
tial contact than the absorbed artistic priest- 
hood of ritual basking in the glow of its own 
stained glass. 

Naturally, they who have forgotten whither 
they are going and they who have forgotten to 
consider transportation are both wrong. Ritual 
for revenue only is a sin, and so is indifference 
to the immensely difficult matter of effective 
expression. When Mrs. Austin says that there 
is a marked disposition on the part of the 
women leaders of women's thinking "to pay 
the price of form," we must assume that she 
means dictated form; for there can be no com- 
munication without some form, and if form is 
indispensable it is worth its reasonable price. 

107 



HALF GODS AND THE GODDESS 

Plainly, what Mrs. Austin objects to is not 
merely an artistic double standard, nor even a 
dictatorship of tradition, but the loss to intel- 
lectual life which she deduces from this failure 
in fellowship. 

To the reader of this page all such questions 
may seem grossly academic. Yet, since art 
cannot really be separated from life, though 
some of its votaries often seem to wish it might, 
Mrs. Austin's resentment has more than a pro- 
fessional bearing. She is thinking of social 
growth, an indulgence which certain of the 
intellectuals are sure to regard as in itself a 
disqualifying innocence. There is no need to 
defend her implication that the arts have a 
social obligation, nor to waste time on those 
fanatics of form who preach liberty and live 
in a cage. Neither is there occasion to empha- 
size the fact that "so-called intellectuals" have 
never had any discernible influence upon the 
arts. The arts have been moved and endur- 
ingly influenced by the strong-arm men and 
not by the male sewing circles. Unless Mrs. 
Austin is considering a larger group than I have 
in mind — she seems to be considering a very 
small group — her protest appears as a pro- 
founder compliment than the group deserves. 
And after all there is the chance that a group 
may turn out to be theoretical. We build a 
good many groups by antipathy to states of 

108 



HALF GODS AND THE GODDESS 

mind, and a group may acquire the dimensions 
of the antipathy. 

However, there remains the question of the 
young man and the mature woman, and if that 
question were distinctively American it might 
be worth while to determine its antecedents. 
I doubt that it is a distinctively American ques- 
tion. I doubt the postulate of a new schism 
between young men and mature women. I 
suspect that it is the same old schism. The 
effect of difference in Europe is largely due to 
a tradition. Doubtless there is a difference, 
but that difference has been exaggerated by 
literary history, for example, and especially by 
the picturesque history of the salon. 

The salon, which wanes in Europe, was never 
successfully transplanted to American soil. 
Efforts to add it to our social stage- setting have 
sometimes been grotesque, sometimes pathetic, 
and not infrequently funny. The salon is 
predicated on one woman and a gathering of 
men. It has varied from that basic notion, 
but it was at its best when so ordered. Under 
the older European system all men were de- 
tached or detachable. Thus men could not 
only be "brought out" by a skilled woman, 
but had the advantage of meeting one another, 
whether the women were clever or stupid. The 
woman supplied essential social initiative. She 
was entitled to the glory of the adventure and 

109 



HALF GODS AND THE GODDESS 

had much of that from grateful gallantry, in 
print and out of it. Also she did not escape 
the flings of criticism. Perhaps she succeeded 
best when she was herself not too abominably 
clever. Madame de Stael was right enough when 
she interrupted Coleridge, who wanted to talk 
all the time and would have nothing but 
silence from everybody else, yet she was too 
good a talker herself to make an ideal salonette. 
Goethe and Schiller, as well as Coleridge, com- 
plained of her. George Sand, whom Nietzsche 
disliked and Baudelaire called a chatterer, may 
not always have been adored, but she was 
ever interesting. "She was," says Huneker, 
"pre-eminently the critical midwife to many 
poets, pianists, painters, composers, and think- 
ers." This, it appears, is the quality the effec- 
tive mature woman must have. By the opinion 
of Huneker, George Sand had "the feather-bed 
temperament, and soothed masculine nerves 
exacerbated by the cruel exigencies of art." 
The urbane Renan assures us that she "drew 
charming pages from people who had never 
written a single good page." The wonder of 
woman was more than a gallantry with Renan. 
He was writing of Emma Kosilis when he 
wished that he might be "born again a woman" 
to study the other phase of living instituted by 
the Creator — "so that I might comprehend the 
two poetries of the thing." No woman could 

110 



HALF GODS AND THE GODDESS 

ever have any trouble with a man who thought 
in terms of "the two poetries." 

But the salon as a historical phase is too 
devious for any digression. The circumstance 
that we have failed to import it is my present 
concern, for if its withering in America is due 
to the strictly social mechanics upon which 
the salon is based, we might find here a simple 
explanation for the offensive fact that men 
flock too much by themselves, or do not suffi- 
ciently flock at all except in theoretical groups. 

It does not seem to me to be debatable that 
American salons failed because they could not 
detach the men. Of women as wise and as 
charming as any Europe has produced there 
have been plenty; of men who could be shaken 
loose from other interests to pay homage to a 
focal woman and an idea, there have ever been 
few. Among all other interests, that of marital 
privilege and obligation has been dominating. 
An American may be capable of forgetting that 
he is married, but he likes his wife to be named 
in an invitation, and when his wife is invited 
she sometimes goes. A salon with wives stops 
being a salon. It may be something just as 
good, or much better, from some other point 
of view, but it ceases to represent the same 
idea, for it dilutes the group in the proportion 
of its nontechnical additions. In a bisexual 
group a merely accompanying husband is as 

111 



HALF GODS AND THE GODDESS 

diluting to the idea as a merely accompanying 
wife. The coeducational salon has ended by 
meaning nothing more than a social party. It 
could be held together by a "purpose"; it 
could have social charm for those who were 
capable of enjoying social charm; but it could 
represent no interchange parallel to the salon 
interchange. 

Thus an American Madame Mohl, who set 
about gathering men, was squarely confronted 
by the specter of the wife. Even young men 
are likely to be married, and the young married 
are often more ritualistic about such things 
than the old married, even when they have 
the reputation, in intellectual matters, of being 
quite devilish. And an American Madame 
Mohl soon found that she wanted at least a 
few of the women who, in growing numbers, 
came to represent not only intellectual aims, 
but intellectual achievement. This increased 
the complexity. A married man might join a 
strictly masculine group presided over by one 
woman, and some deference to a theory of 
essential form might justify to the absent the 
presence of the one hostess woman. But if 
there were other women — ! No, the thing 
could not be done. 

So that the American woman who sought to 
establish a salon had more to encounter than 
any question of her own equipment. She 

112 



HALF GODS AND THE GODDESS 

might be a motherly Hannah More, who had 
written nineteen dull volumes of her own; she 
might be a deferential George Eliot, who found 
association with intellectual men to be "an 
indisputable source of feminine culture"; she 
might be a sparkling De Stael who frustrated 
"unlimited soliloquy" and who, if there must 
be what De Quincey called a " symposiarch," 
was ready to enter the lists on her own account; 
in the end, if not at the beginning, she must 
encounter the insuperable obstacle of a changed 
life about her. 

It would be futile to suggest that the whole- 
some interchange and co-operation which Mrs. 
Austin prefigures must be dependent upon the 
welfare of any institution so archaic as the 
salon, yet it cannot be denied that the condi- 
tions which inhibit the salon still have an 
influence on such independent interchange. 
Mrs. Austin notes that "there is even in the 
American mind a slight suspicion of impro- 
priety in the idea of free association between 
young men and older women." The American 
mind is full of suspicions that are more than 
slight. Particularly where sex is concerned, 
the American mind has a spinster alertness for 
the improper. As a mind it has a secure con- 
viction of a superior decency, and thus feels 
itself to be endowed with a copious discrimina- 
tion. Fortunately, business and professional 

113 



HALF GODS AND THE GODDESS 

life have opened opportunities for "free asso- 
ciation" that should hold certain compensa- 
tions for any social loss. American thinking 
can find ways of submitting to grewsome sus- 
picions and intrusions, but it has shown unex- 
ampled liberality at least in surface toleration 
for competition in the arts and sciences. It 
thinks it wants this competition to be free, and 
if it is free it will establish its natural com- 
munications and fellowships. Even sex rivalry, 
which must always exist, and which only a 
deluded idealism could hope to obliterate, can- 
not be inimical to cultural advancement. It 
should, indeed, be a stimulating help. Cul- 
tural advancement is not to be attained with- 
out conflict. If there is to be a "woman 
culture" it must fight its way. It must meet a 
man culture. It must, for instance, meet 
critics like Joseph Hergesheimer, who points 
to women's influence upon letters and refuses to 
recognize the influence as a beneficent influ- 
ence because it is of women. It must recognize 
that a woman culture, like a man culture, will 
have its grades, its falsities and futilities, its 
blind alleys, its mincing niceties that bring the 
very idea of culture into contempt. 

The advantage of individual association 
between the mature woman and the young 
man in furtherance of art would be the kind 
of advantage that would accrue from such asso- 

114 



HALF GODS AND THE GODDESS 

ciation in furtherance of life. The advantage 
would exist both in the woman and man fact, 
and in the youth and maturity fact. The 
"mature" have spoiled a great deal of youth, 
and youth has added many a prickly discom- 
fort to maturity. Youth, if it has imagination 
and energy, is likely to be preoccupied with 
rebellions. Rebellions are as necessary as the 
later recoveries from them. Just how youth 
recovers is of great importance. It is always 
possible that a wise enough maturity may help 
it to recover without loss, or at all events with 
accumulated compensations. Tolstoy said of 
Dostoievsky that "he felt a great deal, but he 
thought poorly." When maturity improves the 
thinking of youth it is quite within its reasonable 
function, but when it hurts or rebukes youth's 
power to feel and to dare, it inflicts a blight. 

The right mature woman always has and 
always will have a profound influence upon 
young men. She will not be a Victoria, driving 
her bishops and ambassadors to the ignominy 
of lying full length upon the floors of their 
bedrooms to smoke up the chimney. She will 
understand her young men, and she will be a 
means to their larger understanding of life. She 
will express to them not barrier, but proportion. 

I can fancy her taking one sort of wild young 
poet in hand quite as if she were not taking 
him in hand. I can fancy her telling him that 

115 



HALF GODS AND THE GODDESS 

we expect a man poet to be male, but that by 
the same token we expect him to be a man, if 
not a gentleman — that a poet is no more 
released from the obligation to be a gentleman 
by something in his art than a clergyman, let us 
say, would be released from being a gentleman 
by something in his theology — that a he-man 
poetry has been written and will be written 
again. I can fancy her listening (and mak- 
ing a mighty good audience) to his chansons 
grise and his fleurs du mat; hearing him promise 
an incorrigible violence or saying, as Albert 
Samain said to his notebook: 

I dream now of composing little things, light and ex- 
quisite, made of nothing and deliciously suggestive, like 
certain slight Chinese poems. They ought to be fragile 
and precious as porcelain, like tiny porcelain cups, from 
which one drinks a drop of concentrated tea, whose 
fragrance lingers for hours. 

I can fancy her as being finely tolerant, encour- 
agingly responsive, to both the vigorous and the 
precious, but as drawing back when, in an effort 
to be a beautiful blackguard, he ended by being 
questionably beautiful and imperfectly a black- 
guard. If she happened to find him with the 
notion that he is "strong" if he is nasty enough; 
if she found him looking for a voluptuous liberty 
that would be somehow utterly irresponsible, 
talking about nous autres, the divine flame, and 
the vulgarity of a world that asks you what 

116 



HALF GODS AND THE GODDESS 

you mean, she might hit upon a way of per- 
suading him that it is possible to be liberal 
without being libidinous, that it is possible to 
be like Rosalind's magician — most profound in 
his art and yet not damnable. She might be 
able to show him that there has been no 
instance of a really great poet who harped 
endlessly on harlotry and hyacinths; that it 
is, in fact, possible to be incidentally male, that 
to be gloriously male the maleness must be 
incidental, and that to be everlastingly hunting 
adjectives for sex and sunsets is to overlook 
quite a large number of other interesting 
considerations. 

I say, she might. And he might be influenced. 
He would make allowance for her disqualifying 
femininity, but to him this might not, after 
all, be so disqualifying as an older masculinity. 
A good weapon, if she knew how to use it, 
would be evidence of his triteness, for although 
he might stick to it that oldness of subject 
would prove that he had hit upon the elemen- 
tal, to trace in his newness of manner something 
actually quite as old would be arresting. But 
her best method would be to let him alone, 
shrewdly to discount the natural duration of 
literary measles, to worry neither about Freu- 
dian "escapes" nor the future of art, and to be 
content with any possible visualization of all 
that lies outside of young egoism and zest. 
9 117 



HALF GODS AND THE GODDESS 

If the mature woman found occasion to 
remind herself that even maturity has some 
rights, and that among these rights is that of 
not being too responsible as to the younger, 
she would be aiding all intellectual causes. The 
sureness of the young man is no more sure 
than that of the young woman, and in both 
the sureness is part of their panoply. The 
editing by life will bring its damage and its 
benefits to both. To be cheated of having 
been sure is to have lost a great lift and a great 
corrective. The sure, old and young, all have 
the same destiny — to be undeceived. The 
moral is to keep on being sure. All sureness 
cannot have genius, but all genius must have 
sureness. Sometimes it is called faith, and 
faith should begin at home in the individual 
mind. 

As for any control of the rituals or the 
avenues of expression, I do not believe that 
either sex or years can give security against 
competition. If there is to be what Mrs. 
Austin nominates as "a genuine woman cul- 
ture," I believe that women will never be able 
to hold it for their own. It will elope with 
man culture. It will thereby meet all the 
natural chances of incompatibility, facing here 
as elsewhere the fundamental complexity of 
adjustment that preserves life from sameness 
and art from ossification. 

118 



THE PRODUCER 



THE PRODUCER 

WHEN Lamb confessed that he was "sen- 
timentally disposed to harmony, but 
organically incapable of a tune," he was 
expressing a contradiction of will and faculty 
such as I recognize as affecting my excursions 
into economics. 

For example, I have been frequently bewil- 
dered by the philosophy of Single Tax. I find 
many occasions to like Single-Taxers. I have 
been fascinated by the picture they draw of 
conditions that will prevail when Single Tax 
is in operation. But despite a suspicion of 
inadequacy in my own reasoning — a suspicion 
emphasized by many a blunder — I continue 
to question the logic of Single Tax. I keep on 
seeing tax not as expressing a need to regulate 
or rebuke, but simply as expressing a need for 
the money. I keep on seeing basic land taxes 
as general club dues. I see supplementary 
property taxes as a corollary of property pro- 
tection and of various phases of property privi- 
lege. I see the club member who uses the 
billiard-room implements as paying a special 
fee. The land doesn't need a fire department, 

121 



THE PRODUCER 

a plumbing inspector, or a school superintend- 
ent. A skyscraping apartment building holding 
fifty families asks more service and more 
implements than the mere land. In that propor- 
tion the house committee called the govern- 
ment asks more money. If the club has a very 
expensive lawsuit — call it a war — the club treas- 
urer may insist on a special assessment, not 
because you are a guilty member, but because 
once more he simply needs the money. And 
so on. You may know how these can't-see- 
Single-Tax people think. At some point I must 
be wrong. That is inevitable — even if I am 
right. But I don't know just where. Like 
most other people in the same situation, I think 
I am open-minded, yet I may be shut-minded 
at the very point where conviction might get 
through. 

I illustrate the same obscurity as to the 
preachment that "all wealth comes from the 
land." I see all life as deriving its physical 
nourishment from the land (and the air and 
sunlight), and I am assured that all material 
things are derived from the land, but the 
scientific definitions of wealth that name land 
and labor as the producers of wealth leave me 
groping. The Thinker's part in the partner- 
ship seems to be silent, but it seems to me to 
be real. I see the production of wealth in the 
union of raw material, physical effort and the 

122 



THE PRODUCER 

Idea. In primitive production the laborer may 
embody the idea, and the partnership may be 
that much simpler. But obviously all produc- 
tion is not so simple as that. A field of corn 
may be raised on elemental partnership terms, 
but a steamship or a printing press or a wireless 
telephone system is another matter. I want 
to make room for a Fulton, an Edison, and a 
Wright in the partnership, as well as for a 
Galileo, a Columbus, and a Pasteur. Though 
I be held to the fixed definition of wealth, and 
to all of Karl Marx's "socially necessary" 
implications, I still feel that there should be 
room for Marx himself; that wealth is derived 
also from the man who tells where and how to 
produce it and where and how to distribute it. 
I still feel that ideas are the foremost of all 
factors in production, that ideas themselves 
are a product. 

For this reason I continue, and in all admira- 
tion for the brilliant scholar who laid down 
these doctrines of the "socially necessary," and 
for the earnestness of his modern disciples, to 
be profoundly perplexed by the uses of that 
word "producer." Though "capital" were 
banished and "exploiters" forever removed, 
it would yet remain true that ideas are domi- 
nant; it would yet remain true that the idea 
of the locomotive is as essential as the steel or 
the "labor force" of the steam fitter. Even if 

123 



THE PRODUCER 

Marx's materialistic conceptions were accepted 
in full, it would yet remain true that the inter- 
preter of these conceptions and the authors of 
new conceptions would be producers of the 
highest importance. 

Though we must accept the word wealth as 
of fixed materialistic meaning, there must be 
recognition of that concurrent factor for which 
many names have been hazarded, but which, 
because it is imponderable and seldom can be 
made to fit the true wealth definition by hav- 
ing an exchange price, floats cloudily in the 
imagination of a practical world. To forget 
ideas is like forgetting the sun. Explaining or 
developing the earth without considering the 
sun would parallel the stupidity of explaining 
or developing a civilization without considering 
ideas — without considering the dominant and 
determining factor. 

The greatest producers, then, have been the 
greatest "idea men." A few of these idea men 
have been named by history. Sometimes they 
have laid aside a hoe or cobbler's awl; some- 
times they have laid aside the tools of a 
carpenter — stopped creating and distributing 
things to create and distribute ideas. Some- 
times thay have had a glory. Sometimes they 
have had a Golgotha. 

Yet the sad thing is not the situation with 
which I have fumbled, and through which my 

124 



THE PRODUCER 

own technical ignorance of economics must 
shine with a clearness that makes apology 
superfluous, but the far profounder neglect of 
producers for which we cannot trace responsi- 
bility to any Marxian doctrine. " Das Kapital " 
and its interpreters have no monopoly of ma- 
terialistic conceptions or materialistic conduct. 

It is a trite lament, but in the midst of a 
world that is pretty much as it always has 
been, yet has learned to be glib in slogans, I 
see something ironic in the pretense that the 
existing antithesis to a radicalism that insists 
upon the material must be a conservatism that 
insists upon the spiritual. As a joke the pretense 
is transparent enough. The most preposterous 
situation in the modern world is of sentimental 
"materialists," on the one hand, and of sordid 
"idealists," on the other. Most of the world 
belongs to the reactionaries and the inert, and 
most of the world is deplorably indifferent 
toward its greatest producers. 

I am thinking at the moment particularly 
of those idea men who cannot quickly be trans- 
lated into material articles of exchange, and 
who do not appeal to the cupidities of any 
camp. I am thinking of producers of beauty 
— beauty in the art of living, beauty in the 
expression of the individual and his relation- 
ships, beauty in the kindling factors, beauty in 
sheer emotion and dreams. I am thinking of 

125 



THE PRODUCER 

Beethovens who did not catch the ear of their 
time, of low-born Da Vincis who did not find 
royal or other protectors, of Shakespeares who 
happened in the wrong place at the wrong 
season. I am thinking of the strugglers of our 
own day who look out upon a wonderfully 
practical world, choked with "wealth," stifling 
with conveniences, busy with everything but 
beauty that doesn't pay. I see an old man in 
a studio, grinning sarcastically and exclaiming, 
"They sit up nights trying to forget artists!" 

The real dividing line is not between pro- 
ducing marketable things upon a Marxian basis 
and producing business upon a "capitalistic" 
basis. The line runs between the material 
thing that is of the body and the immaterial 
thing that is of the spirit. "Old stuff," snaps 
Efficiency. "It has always been that way," 
mutter ghostly whispers from the pulpit, the 
paint box, and the inkwell. 



GIVING AND TAKING 



GIVING AND TAKING 

EACH revolution furnishes a fresh prolif- 
eration of texts. Russia's cataclysm has 
outranked all predecessors in "talking 
points." The total of any revolution is meas- 
urable only by the impudence of a dreamer. 
Blundering deductions from the struggles of 
the soviet will go on spattering the pages of 
print. Yet only an opportunity to blunder is 
any opportunity at all. 

Applied communism, simply as a thought, 
has set up a Terror wherever there are minds. 
The soviet, representing the supreme "show 
down," closed millions of mental doors with a 
slam. As a piece of literary tracery commun- 
ism once was delightfully entertaining; rather 
more so than socialism. Socialism stood too 
near. It had begun to happen, and thus to be 
annoying. Communism had the beauty of 
remoteness. If people wanted to paint it they 
were as free as if they wanted to paint heaven. 
A Brook Farm, for example, where all were to 
share alike, without any inequality of privilege 
or reward, and where all were under equal 
obligation as to the plow and the dishes, was 

129 



GIVING AND TAKING 

a joyous detached spectacle, to be only mildly 
derided, and giving text to many charming 
dissertations. As real happenings, such put- 
tering experiments were praised as much, and 
ignored as much, as courage or the golden rule. 

When communism happened on a scale that 
took it out of the class of merely literary ideas 
or small-group enthusiasms, when it began to 
impinge and threaten, above all, when it began 
to appear as a device that cost something, the 
situation changed vastly indeed. Quite sud- 
denly, thinking about communism, and espe- 
cially speaking about it, became an extraor- 
dinarily important matter. It could become a 
matter of going to jail. A new innocence like 
Mr. Ho wells' s A Traveller from Altruria might 
bring a clanking challenge, "What d'you mean 
Altruria?" 

The discovery that communism can express 
not only a wish to give, but a wish to take, has 
been a sad shock. To yield to some one else 
the privilege of wearing a smock and living on 
nothing a year is one thing. It is, naturally, 
quite another to have some one requisition 
your spoons or move into your parlor. Most 
people are convinced that they are willing to 
give and take. But in each case they want to 
make their own choice. Having taken his 
billion, the multiman wants to give away some 
millions to suit himself. The right seems to 

130 



GIVING AND TAKING 

him inalienable. Our whole system predicates 
such a right. If we find ourselves taking rather 
largely, we are consoled by the thought that 
we can give, when the time comes, in just the 
right proportion. As with the young man who 
had great possessions, the peremptory chal- 
lenge hurts. Giving up all is pretty as a privi- 
lege, or on paper. As a compulsion it is resented 
for its disrespect to initiative, and this is an era 
i of loud homage to initiative. 

Communism is effective as bringing sharply 
to a focus the fact that most of us want some- 
thing for nothing. People who want every- 
thing for nothing may furnish contrast, but 
they cannot furnish acquittal to those who ask 
less. Nature seems to be responsible, as usual. 
She commits so many benevolences that a 
habit of expecting to get a good many things 
for no more trouble than that of picking them 
up has been corrupting. We pass laws and leave 
nature to take its course. It does, and the 
fruit can be bitter, because inertia and stupidity 
are as natural as energy and wit. If our diver- 
sity were not responsible for creating the 
problem called government, the picturesque- 
ness of that diversity might have been more 
entertaining. 

Communism accepts the dictum of science 
that everything must be paid for. The trouble 
is that it goes farther. It insists with an iron 

131 



GIVING AND TAKING 

finality not only that everything must be paid 
for, but that everything must be paid for by 
everybody. A "rider" like this can be ap- 
palling, especially when it slips money from 
under the word "pay" and leaves that word 
starkly to mean work. 

If we could forget the unforgettable, and pass 
over communism's supplementary denial as to 
property, the insistence on universal partici- 
pation would still stand out as fearful. We 
are so far from a mood of collective participa- 
tion in anything whatever that even a scheme 
that could conclusively promise the getting of 
everything for nothing might not hope for a 
unanimous response. We should still have 
those who think it wrong to take anything 
without working for it, those who would com- 
plain about the methods of distribution, and 
those who hate anything that everybody else 
wants. 



FOREIGNERS 



FOREIGNERS 

ALTHOUGH going abroad still is respect- 
able and continues to be congenial to 
every proper theory of culture, foreigners 
persist in being offensive. It is to be gathered 
that when we go to the foreigners they are 
elevating, but that when they come to us they 
are degrading. Pascal thought that all the 
troubles of man come from his not knowing 
how to sit still. Perhaps this illuminates one 
of the vicious circles. The restless rich Ameri- 
can who may spend a few millions in Europe 
is seldom accused of anything worse than in- 
ducing foreigners to believe that America has 
a Croesus on every corner. The immediate 
effect of persuading the foreigner to come over 
for some of the same sort of money is likely 
to be dismissed as a joke until some foreigner 
starts back again to Europe carrying a stocking- 
ful, with the wicked purpose of spending it upon 
a hostage family in Naples. Such an outrage 
is so disturbing to our economic equilibrium 
that every hater of foreigners is incited to view 

135 



FOREIGNERS 

with a still larger alarm the whole matter of 
alien intrusion. 

Not merely our economic equilibrium, but 
our social comfort is threatened by foreigners, 
particularly while they are fresh foreigners, 
before they have been stewed in the vat of 
nationalism. One who cannot feel the proper 
repugnance is often at a serious controversial 
disadvantage. It is an unforgivable awkward- 
ness to indicate the fact that we're all 
imported, that the Pilgrim Fathers were foreign- 
ers to a man, that the people who contrived to 
establish this Republic were foreigners or sons 
of foreigners, and that if immigrants once 
represented the kind of pluck that gets out of 
one place to start over again in another, they 
may still be expressing something of the same 
quality. Evidently it is an impoliteness to 
wonder precisely when the foreigner stopped 
being new blood and began to be "scum." 
The club called the United States having 
chosen to limit its membership, and having a 
waiting list, the seized implication is of a right 
to insult the newer members. 

Such a consideration might be open to re- 
buke for its sheer triteness if the recrudescence 
of antipathy had not given new point to the 
question. Evidently foreigners will not stop 
having foreignness. For one thing, they ex- 
hibit impudent expectations. They have been 

136 



FOREIGNERS 

credibly informed that this is a free country. 
Our old advertising seems to have permeated, 
and to have survived, embarrassingly, the new- 
issues in which subtleties of emphasis are more 
difficult to translate. Then, again, foreigners 
breed. The impoliteness of fecundity is to be 
conveyed in due course. By the time the 
foreigner's foreignness begins to be decently 
obscured he gets the idea. But meanwhile 
much mischief has been done. Vulgarly large 
families happen before the refined sterilities of 
culture have fully exerted their influence. 
The foreigner may believe that the world be- 
longs to those who can take hold of it and 
populate it; that if we can't have a census we 
can't have a history. He will find lip-stick 
ethics against him. Beauty-parlor morality 
will cut him dead. His children complete his 
education. They are quicker in assimilating 
modern theories. In the end he will read, with 
a knowingness quite hopefully cynical, the gor- 
geous fantasy of a Mr. Shaw promising that 
babies will be born without mothers. If at 
last he catches the new spirit he will perceive 
that mothers are cliche, a banality intolerable 
to futurism. 

Much may be done with a foreigner, once he 
is recognized as unavoidable, but there is no 
blinking the fact that he can be shockingly 
deficient in humility. There is always the 

137 



FOREIGNERS 

chance that he will have ideas. He ought to 
know that his single duty is to be molded. 
Being only a foreigner, he should be meek, 
whereas he is often somewhat of a man, growl- 
ing when he is hurt quite like more highly 
privileged native men. It may be hard to 
teach him that an absolutely finished American 
does not growl at all, that in suffering to be 
strong the finished American heckles not, 
neither does he do anything resentful implying 
unpleasant noise or conspicuousness. The 
primitives of an older civilization are acutely 
discordant to the sensitive sophistication of 
the younger. A visit is one thing; an indefinite 
stay is quite another. And when the incubus 
not only involves rearrangement of household 
ways, but has the effect of taking these rear- 
rangements for granted, hospitality despairs. 

The truth is, of course, that we are tired of 
being a young country. To have grown up is 
to wish to settle down. Settling down has a 
formula, and repeatedly changing the formula 
is too much like an irksome adventure. 
When we were new, one experiment looked 
much like any other. Now that we are begin- 
ning to feel the weight of a past, to be able at 
last to make a three-century gesture with an 
old-family arrogance, it becomes a downright 
nuisance to find a humanity that looks like 
poor relations knocking at the door. 

138 



FOREIGNERS 

No. Foreigners will not do. They suggest 
promiscuity. "For thereby some have enter- 
tained angels unawares" — very good, to be 
sure, as a piece of sentiment, especially by way 
of justifying the laxity that let the angels slip 
in. But what proper patriot feels like gambling 
against a horde of odds? Be soft with foreign- 
ers and presently you will be talking interna- 
tionalism. If you talk internationalism some 
one will call you a liberal. What then? Isaiah 
has said it. "The liberal deviseth liberal 
things." What more scathingly logical warning 
could the patriot give? 



LEGS 



LEGS 

MUCH has been written about the power 
of words, yet it seems to remain for some 
authoritative person, some cool-headed, 
incorrigibly scientific and properly unemotional 
investigator, to fix before us the whole truth 
as to the relationship between words and life. 

We say that words are things. The word as 
a weapon is quite within our familiar accept- 
ance (Stevenson called the unanswerable com- 
pliment "a social bludgeon"); but the sheer 
ethics of words is still a vague matter. A 
thousand admonitions hint at definable re- 
sponsibility. What one may say as distinct 
from what one may do, belongs to the earliest 
formulas of education. Statutes of the state, 
which tell us what we must not eat or drink, 
and what clothes we must not wear on our 
bodies, tell us what clothes of language we 
must not drape upon our thoughts. 

There are endless suggestions of an objective 
hazard in words which should long ago have 
received better attention. One grows up in a 
nervous dread that a devastating syllable may 

143 



LEGS 

be spilled somewhere, like a trickle from an 
illicit bottle in a hand bag, and utterly ruin a 
hitherto well-safeguarded reputation. We may 
often see a kind of fright on the faces of a 
group, even the most casual social group, lest 
a wrong word may wreck the peace of the sit- 
uation. There is no chance that a physical 
blow will be struck. The situation may be 
too polite to permit the suspicion that anyone 
totes a gun, but everyone knows that a con- 
cealed vocal weapon can be deadly beyond 
estimate. The crippling constraint, the fear- 
ful negative force of the effort not to say 
something, might well seem disproportionate 
if we forget the explosive potency of this blessed 
thing we call language. 

The Italians have a saying that "deeds are 
male, words are female," but Shakespeare 
noted that "'t's a kind of deed to say well"; 
and if it is a kind of deed to say well, it is a 
kind of deed to say ill. How definitely every 
word is a deed we no longer debate. It might 
reasonably be contended that if words are 
female, Kipling is again reinforced. A shrewd 
Scottish philosopher was willing to say that 
"the inventor of the most barbarous term may 
thus have an influence on mankind more im- 
portant than all which the most illustrious 
conqueror could effect by a long life of fatigue 
and anxiety, and peril, and guilt." 

144 



LEGS 

No wonder, then, that the stalwarts in lan- 
guage's Loyal Legion have stood alert for 
offenders. If a hurled word bomb may change 
the course of history, naturally every care- 
taker has a duty. 

Doubtless there are some words which, 
though they have managed to be born, are 
irrevocably exiled, if not outcast. Their euphe- 
mistic ambassadors are permitted to mingle; 
they themselves seem forever shut out. These 
are often simply primary words, the least com- 
mon denominators. Primary words can have 
a naked terribleness. This is not a naked world, 
and we do not like such words around. Often 
ostracized words are not only elemental, but 
hopelessly vulgar. Even man to man they are 
never mentioned. The idea behind the word 
may be circuitously named, but it is established 
that while the idea is freely thinkable, the stark 
term itself has an inherent repulsiveness and 
must never be breathed. 

Evidently, however, certain words which 
have been held in abeyance, or quite mufHed, 
like certain civilities in the case of a person 
under a cloud or open to suspicion, await a 
changed acceptance in the matter of the idea. 
I recall what seemed to be the first speaking of 
"damn" on the American stage. Most of the 
auditors appeared to be shocked. Apparently 
the shock was agreeable in most instances. 

145 



LEGS 

This was not to be measured by the almost 
unanimous laugh. The laugh answers before 
conscience. Taste often rebukes participation. 
Yet it was possible to feel that the incident was 
accepted as refreshing, or as subject to some 
cordiality of consideration. At that time 

"damn" in print was always "d n." Even 

the devil did not have his due. He was ' ' d 1 ' ' 

in all respectable secular print, and, by a per- 
haps inevitable corollary, "h 1" was de- 
cently censored. There was, by the way, a 
quandary for one who read aloud: a dash can- 
not be vocalized. "Dash it," was a quaintness 
of early print. There is a whole literature of 
euphemistic expletives, as well as a strange 
iteration of subterfuges in actual profanity, 
many of which seem to have a permanent life. 
The modern realist may well regard with amaze- 
ment the ingenuity with which literature has 
conveyed an effect of reality, even in rough 
talk, without using the literal terms. Steven- 
son, for example, though interpreting in Treas- 
ure Island the flavor of the most coarse-spoken 
class in the world, if we except the level of the 
apaches, could write a whole story without real 
cuss words and leave no feeling of artifice or 
unreality — at least he did not at the period of 
my first reading. 

The ultimate word has often had to wait on 
the doorstep long after its idea was granted 

146 



LEGS 

admittance. Thus the word "sex" was under 
a ban until the open discussion of sex had 
become a commonplace. The index expurga- 
torius of a proper periodical or newspaper 
abided, as usual, the established example of 
other print. Sex might be expounded, but the 
word "sex" had in itself almost a libidinous 
sound, which was sternly reprehended. Not 
until after Freud did the complex receive the 
completely extenuating stroke. 

The astonishing character of an inhibition is 
often unfolded to us by the realization of its 
removal. Sometimes the removal is spectacu- 
lar; sometimes it follows the simple loosenings 
of an evolution. I find at hand, in the pages 
of a distinguished magazine, a paper on "Old 
Age" in which a retired gentleman candidly 
and charmingly discusses his outlook on past 
and present. It is here that I come upon this 
passage: "I love the theater, but have a new 
horror of front rows, especially if there are 
* legs ' in the show; for, alas ! I am baldheaded." 
"Legs," even quoted legs — and quotation 
marks are a kind of fig leaf for a word that is 
only by way of being wholly permissible — 
could not possibly have been written thirty 
years ago with any such connotation or uttered 
in any such company. The leg has been in a 
situation not quite identical with that of the 
Fiji Islander who is, we are told by Edward 

147 



LEGS 

Clodd, not permitted to mention his own name. 
It has been more in the situation of the Kwak- 
juti Indian, who can pawn his name, and who 
for the term of the pawning has to take another 
name or be anonymous. Hypocrisy has held 
the pawn ticket for "leg." 

There may be a more grotesque instance in 
linguistic psychology (I defer to the Max 
Miillers), but at the moment I qin think of 
nothing so awkward, so shamefaced, so indica- 
tive as the entrance of this term. To see it 
come, not as brazen, not with any lusty swank, 
but with a skulking self -consciousness that still 
gives its manner a culprit effect, is to find fresh 
humor in humanity's passion for little troubles. 
We say that language is the clothing of thought. 
We admit that clothing, after sheltering and 
concealing, may have communicatory expres- 
sion. We wake up to find that the clothing of 
thought has deliberately chosen to supplement 
its primary functions by adopting a ball and 
chain to retard each foot, putting bird bones 
in the lobes of the ears, adding ghastly nostril 
distenders and some equivalent torture for the 
lower lip. In aggravation, even the shedding of 
one of these encumbrances leaves us with a kind 
of guilty awkwardness, a serf -souled tendency to 
fumble with our freedom. Since we invented 
our own shackles and fastened them on, liberty 
brings a strange mixture of relief and chagrin. 

148 



LEGS 

For a person still living who may have 
been born anywhere between haircloth sofas 
and crayon portraits it is true that a refusal to 
say "legs" was mitigated by the fact that it 
had long been a sinful impoliteness to think 
them. The convention that "the Queen of 
Spain has no legs" had fastened itself upon 
civilized usage. But for that convention there 
could have been nothing astonishing enough 
to claim special attention in a certain narra- 
tive by the author of the Lives of the Berkeley s, 
who, when he was a newly imported page to 
Queen Elizabeth, was one day called to account 
for his awkward manner of "making a leg" in 
the courtesy, and the queen lifted her garments 
calf high "that I might the better observe the 
grace of drawing back the foot and bowing of 
the knee." This recital may or may not prove 
that Queen Elizabeth differed from the Queen of 
Spain, but it once more calls attention to the 
fact that even, and perhaps especially, a queen 
can never be sure when she is making history. 

Of literature it may be said that, in general, 
it conformed to the convention we are con- 
sidering. Even the word, without awkward 
connotations, was somehow taboo. This may 
account for the fact that, though Solomon's 
Song sings that "his legs are as pillars of 
marble," my Oxford Concordance refuses to 
index the item. Neither does it participate in 
11 149 



LEGS 

the isolated indelicacy of Isaiah when he scolds 
women about "bonnets and ornaments of the 
legs." In the main, poets have exhibited an 
amazing caution. Suckling's phrase in the 
"Ballad upon a Wedding," "her feet beneath 
her petticoat," expressed the nice sense of 
limitation. Her petticoat — that set the bound- 
aries of license. How daintily Herrick refers to 
the circumstance that 

Her pretty feet, like snails, did creep 
A little out! 

Feet patter with a joyous liberty through ten 
thousand verses. When a lifted skirt issued 
challenge to an abandoned imagination, an 
ankle was revealed. Without the fortunate 
intervention of that word "ankle," literature, 
and perhaps thereby legislatures, would have 
had to say "leg" two centuries sooner. As it 
happened, "ankle" was there for purposes of 
rhapsody and rebuke, and "the charms her 
downcast modesty concealed" standardized 
concealment in the proper length and proper 
management of the skirt. 

In a sane world modesty will always be at a 
premium. That expressed modesty is a con- 
vention, that it is not as immutable as arith- 
metic and must constantly undergo change in 
expression though its essence remain always 
the same, is as freshly incredible to the civil- I 

150 



LEGS 

ized as to the savage. Each age has a new 
code, and every code must be definite, for it is 
translating definite implications. Paul, who 
was, indeed, no feminist, yet who well expressed 
the man spirit of his time, was not content to 
declare that he would not suffer women to 
preach, and that they were to "be in silence." 
He was not content to admonish women in 
general terms that they must "adorn them- 
selves in modest apparel." He specified that 
a woman must not braid her hair. He was 
quite right, since in his time braided hair had 
an unpleasant significance. It is significance 
that should determine the gestures of modesty. 
To accuse Paul of narrowness is to overlook his 
environment. It will be said, and it has been 
said often enough, that men are always finding 
excuse in their environment. Critics of Paul 
have complained, even in the pulpit, that no 
stretch of the principle justified him in conclud- 
ing, as between Adam and Eve, that Eve was 
the transgressor, and that the conclusion marks 
him forever as a woman hater. Without digni- 
fying the complaint, it may be pointed out that 
no sincere preacher of feminine modesty can 
be wholly a woman hater. We have no more 
right to accuse Paul of being a woman hater 
than to accuse Charles Lamb of being a misogy- 
nist because he thought Milton's Adam and 
Eve behaved too much like married people. 

151 



LEGS 

Modesty, then, and its interpretations are 
beginning factors in the fate of our word. When 
that roysterer Fielding says, "Thy modesty's 
a candle to thy merit," he was simply acknowl- 
edging that every quality has its sign, and 
sooner or later insists upon its sign. We carry 
around an idea by the shawl strap of its symbol. 
An idea that isn't thus made portable is likely 
to be neglected. The fixed idea of the properly 
invisible assisted the idea of the properly in- 
audible, and sham modesty could not discredit 
the notion. When one of the pupils of Socrates 
came in a ragged garment to parade his humil- 
ity, Socrates remarked, dryly, "I see thy vanity 
through the holes in thy coat." The "vamps" 
of history have always made the most of con- 
cealment. It has long been notorious that 
drapery can become the subtlest implement of 
the frivolous and the depraved. 

Geography has played its whimsical part. 
The immodesty of one land has been quite 
within the modesty of another. The corsage 
of Victoria's iron-clad regulation, with no re- 
gard for unfortunate shoulder blades or wattles, 
was scandalous in Tokyo; yet Victorian bath- 
ing suits were funny beyond understanding to 
a Japanese lady who wore no sea clothes at 
all. The grammar of modesty has always 
been, as General Hancock calamitously de- 
scribed the tariff, a "local issue"; so that the 

152 



LEGS 

Queen of Spain, who had no legs, inevitably 
did not ride a bicycle. 

It was the bicycle, by the way, that began a 
real revolution in women's dress. Dr. Mary 
Walker's trousers left a world of women wholly 
unconvinced. Wheels made shortened skirts 
undebatable,and shortened skirts made anatomy 
undebatable. If this change did not always 
increase reverence for the literal facts of anat- 
omy, if it proved that gallantry had often, if 
not generally, gone farther in assumptions of 
beauty than the facts warranted, it helped to 
sweep away a hypocrisy which reverence 
learned not to need and modesty learned to 
ignore. This coming into collision of mecha- 
nism and modesty had, in fact, extraordinary 
evolutionary consequences. The athletic girl, 
a type older than Greece, was emancipated 
from encumbering devices. What a girl could 
and could not do had been settled in a huge 
percentage of instances by the length of her 
skirts. Her physical needs and rights as a 
human creature had been circumscribed by a 
lying hem. She could not throw a ball scien- 
tifically because her clavicle was too short, but 
she could dance better than a man when she 
had a fair chance. Her wish and her need to 
dance freely were permitted expression mostly 
on the stage. Social dancing, perhaps as con- 
fessing, closely and untheatrically, that she 

153 



LEGS 

really must have legs, always met its frowns. 
Byron insulted the waltz; but then, he had a 
bad foot. Thackeray was violently in opposi- 
tion. "A man who loves dancing," he said, 
"may be set down as an ass; and the fashion 
is gradually going out with the increasing good 
sense of the age." Oddly, it was the irascible 
bachelor Nietzsche who proclaimed dancing as 
"the highest symbol of perfected human 
activity." 

During the long period when the stage might 
make its confessions, but normal life was held 
to rigid concealments and subterfuges, the joke 
reached its cowardly limit, and the poor word 
had the effect of sending decency, as in the 
presence of a hunted mouse, to the vantage of 
a chair or table, with skirts gathered against 
an awful possibility. The evasion entailed im- 
mense difficulties of description. A man could 
break a leg, but a woman could break only a 
limb, and since this designation, though decent, 
was indefinite, she was permitted to break a 
" lower limb." No ribaldry could seem to 
shame the false shame. The joke-smith's fun 
about the spinsters who draped the naked 
"limbs" of the piano was looked upon as at 
best only illustrating how levity can grimace 
in the presence of serious things. The timid 
could not be jested out of their shelter. Hypoc- 
risy was darkest just before the dawn. 

154 



LEGS 

I remember an early evening on a certain 
Western train that had stopped for the twen- 
tieth time in an exhausting effort to butt its 
head through a snowstorm. We were still 
eighteen miles or so from the city in which I 
was to lecture, and every pause plainly lessened 
the chance that my audience, if there should 
happen to be one on such a night, would have 
the high pleasure of hearing what it came for. 
In the seat beside me was a quiet girl who had 
begun to eat her supper out of a package. By 
various signs, across-the-car exclamations and 
visits, I came to understand that she was a 
member of a theatrical company. At last her 
question as to my opinion of the hazard, seeing 
how late it already was, made it plain that a 
stage awaited her, as a lyceum platform awaited 
me. Her anxiety did not seem to equal mine, 
but she had a curiosity as of one who had been 
through many perils and retained a normal 
sense of gambling chances, and the curiosity, 
shining through a pretty demureness, made me 
wish that I might have had a conviction one 
way or the other. Yet I had nothing to offer. 
I only hoped. And it came about that I asked 
her the name of the play in which she was to 
appear. 

"Oh, it isn't a play," she answered through 
the sandwich; "it's only a leg show." 

The "leg show" of those days expressed the 
155 



LEGS 

sharp differentiation between the prosaicand 
the spectacular. That lower limbs are still 
visible on the stage the remark of our retired 
friend sufficiently attests, but they are no 
longer called "leg shows." The leg is no longer 
a specialized lure, or at all events not one to 
be so labeled, for the plain reason that the 
utter familiarity of a fashion has, perhaps for 
all time (though I suppose we should not be 
too sure of that), robbed mischievous frivolity 
as well as ingenious prurience of its excuse. 
Prurience was able to trade on a hypocrisy. 
With the hypocrisy in flight, the game lost 
flavor. You can't tease a concealment that has 
stopped concealing. You can't steal that which 
is freely yielded. Fashion takes all satisfaction 
from an evil blow by turning the other leg. 

At the hour of this writing the mode has 
made its mark at the knee. Since fluctuation 
belongs to the essence of fashion, and since 
fashion cannot escape the dilemma of the irre- 
ducible minimum, the barometer of change is 
certain to show a fall. But, to whatever final 
effect, the intricate topography of exposure sets 
a new line. The leg complex has undergone 
an extraordinary jolt. A new psychology must 
be drafted. In ways which no theory could 
have suspected, a bitterly debated revolution 
in dress has made it necessary to consider from 
new angles questions that are not merely artis- 

156 



LEGS 

tic and not merely whimsical. If it is true that 
in abandoning concealments women have aban- 
doned any of their real modesty, the event has 
been lamentable indeed. If it is true that in 
abandoning these concealments women have 
only kicked off archaic shackles, and with them 
various incrusted coquetries invented in a 
man-made world, there is nothing to weep 
about but the hazards of weather. If the atti- 
tude of men is to be a vital consideration, it 
will be important to find out whether men have 
lost by the change any real respect for women, 
have experienced any lowered impulses either 
of reverence or of response, or have lost nothing 
but a sense of "leg-show" mystery that once 
was so fertile and foolish in the drama of sex. 

Both sides of the contention have been 
vociferously presented. One side has gone so 
far as to imply that woman has been utterly 
abased. The other has gone so far as to insist 
that at last she has been utterly liberated, that 
by a happy synchronization she is at the same 
hour both physically and civically free. There 
is, I trust, nothing wrong in my standing 
aside from the affray, or in my momentary 
absorption by the spectacle of the mere word, 
sheepishly alone in its new liberty. 

Yet I venture to remark that women them- 
selves seem likely to settle the whole question 
in their own way. A deeper student of such 

157 



LEGS 

matters reinforces me. Havelock Ellis gives 
the weight of his profound analysis to the 
statement that women, once they acquire the 
privilege, are more direct than men. Ellis has 
found that women not only think more directly, 
but have, when they wish to have it, a more 
direct way of getting their thought said. He 
mentions, for instance, that Parisian lawyers 
have discovered that women can explain things 
better, and that these lawyers say to their 
working-class clients, "Send me your wife." 
How complicated such study is we may dis- 
cover in Ellis's revelation that, nevertheless, 
women are preternaturally clever in "attaining 
results by ruses." This trait is, we are told, 
"so habitual among women that, as Lombroso 
and Ferrero remark, in women deception is 
'almost physiological.'" Surely now you for- 
give me for standing aside. If women think 
more directly, yet are addicted to ruses, if their 
thought is straight and their actions devious, 
it would be absurd for a man to decide that she 
is wrong in what she is doing when it is deeply 
impossible that he should know what she is 
doing. One thing is certain: she has a sense 
of humor in the matter of clothes that has 
been denied to men. It is not alone the failure 
in man's sense of humor that induces him to > 
think she is dressing solely for him. That 
blunder has a remoter explanation. I suspect 

158 



LEGS 

that no man is fitted to give this explanation 
in full. Evidently there must be a duality in 
many explanations, and sex truth must have 
bi-logic as well as the biologic. Woman's 
understanding with her own sex has been much 
underrated. It has created vast areas of 
obscurity for men. 

Even Havelock Ellis must only be guessing. 
He is ruthless and circumstantial. He seems 
to know. He diagrams mind and body with 
the same assurance. But how are we to judge 
whether, if he is possibly in error as to her men- 
tality, he may not also be in error as to her 
anatomy? For I am compelled to admit that 
the archcritic finds one supreme fault with her 
structure. "This obliquity of the legs," he 
says, "is the most conspicuous aesthetic defect 
of the female form in the erect posture, while 
it unfits women for attitudes of energy, and 
compels them to run by alternate semicircular 
rotations of the legs." Would it be cynical to 
suspect that Ellis was influenced by "semi- 
circular rotations" to believe that the get- 
what-she-wants instinct gave the mind of 
woman a circuitous facility? It may be that 
such a suspicion would be no more unscientific 
than to see in the present passionate interest 
of women in the matter of dressing legs and 
feet a corollary to their notorious preference 
for a happy ending. 

159 



LEGS 

It is more significant to note that in future 
no commentator in this field can occupy the 
position of one privileged to analyze the ob- 
scure. The unhampered mind of woman has 
chosen to acquire an unhampered and a 
describable body. It does not matter that 
some one might indicate the describable 
body as last to be acquired, and draw out 
any frippery of thesis from this case. It does 
not matter how the quarrel may be decided as 
to the immediate reaction upon men. Without 
considering fashion extremists, who are a quite 
negligible minority for the use of cartoonists, 
women have taken one practical means of 
leaving the malice or mischief or sentimental- 
ism of men no leg to stand on. 



THE DESK 



THE DESK 

IT was gaunt and stiff when closed, but when 
you lowered the front, which thus became 
the writing surface, it looked less grim. 
It then began to be a desk. Moreover, the 
uncovering of its compartments gave it features 
and an intelligent mien. Probably it was made 
of cherry. This was to be guessed not by the 
general surface, which had reached a venerable 
blackness, but by the revealed flesh of the 
wood in a series of knifed notches from which 
one might deduce pangs of parturition, or a 
contemplative exuberance. In general the 
desk was prim, austere, shakily old; the notches 
touched it with youth. The young tricks of the 
forgotten blade humanized the thing wonder- 
fully, removed a completeness of awe which 
otherwise might not have been escaped; for I 
was told at the beginning that it was Walt 
Whitman's desk. 

One person who might have been the abso- 
lutely verifying authority as to the desk's 
ancestry had just died, full of years and 
exquisite secrets. Yet there were others, old 

163 



THE DESK 

enough to have profound knowledge, who 
transmitted the tradition with the effect of 
accepted fact. Not as if it were a noteworthy 
fact; there were plenty other Whitman tokens 
and impresses — books he had thumbed and 
penciled, one copy of Leaves of Grass, inscribed 
to an office mate, several old prints with his 
annotations — and signs of him were quite 
taken for granted in that old newspaper shop 
near the Williamsburg ferry. The circum- 
stance that this was Whitman's desk acquired 
an attention as definite yet as casual as the 
desk itself. 

In those days I was the youngest writer on 
the staff of the Brooklyn Times (which hated 
to be called the Williamsburg Times because 
Williamsburg, having wedded Brooklyn, was 
always offended by use of its maiden name) 
and I was still susceptible to the seductions of 
souvenirs. It had, in fact, been suggested, in 
view of my fascinated interest, that I might 
care to take the thing home, and that this 
privilege might be negotiated by the simple 
expedient of paying for a modern substitute. 
There were several objections to such a step. 
First, I hadn't the money; second, the desk 
was decrepit and in no respect of beauty to be 
regarded as the sort of thing one could impose 
at home without domestic complications; and, 
third, so to make the affair one of sordid trans- 

164 



THE DESK 

action (transactions always look sordid when 
you haven't the money) without authentica- 
tion, looked like a sentimentalism that would 
lack the important moral support of certain 
onlookers who had preserved an attitude of 
neutrality as to the whole question. 

But when, in natural succession, the desk at 
last fell to my use, I determined upon a prac- 
tical step. This was after conference with the 
luminaries of our group. Bennett Graham 
Burleigh, of whom, as a war correspondent, 
England was in later years to hear much, 
wondered what I wanted with "the damned 
old thing," but in general the response to my 
consultations was cordial, if sometimes mysti- 
fied. That was an interesting group — Irving 
Bacheller; Herbert Gunnison; John Langdon 
Heaton; Charles Skinner (who wrote With 
Feet to the Earth and had more sky in him than 
any man I ever knew); John Alden, nephew 
of Henry Mills Alden of Harper's; William 
H. Maxwell (for so many years New York's 
Superintendent of Schools) ; William Churchill, 
acquaintance of Stevenson and soon to be 
consul-general at Samoa; a third "Bill," 
William MacDonald Wood, one of the shrewd- 
est editorial writers of his time, and that 
prince of reporters, "Jim" Wood; Elbridge 
Brooks, who had written so many volumes that 
we could not fail to regard him as essentially 
12 165 



THE DESK 

the literary member; and not a few other 
men and women who were afterward to be 
heard from. Since it was impossible (as the 
varied wisdom of this assemblage agreed) to 
summon Walt to the desk, he being then 
seventy-two, enfeebled, and so harshly remote 
as Camden, New Jersey; and since trans- 
porting the desk presented a difficulty quite 
equal to that of buying a substitute, why not ■ 
photograph the relic and submit the document 
to the poet himself? Being then in possession t 
of one of the first hand cameras yet devised, 
I made my own pictorial report of the desk 
and shipped the picture, with an eloquent 
appeal, to Camden. 

The answer came on a square sheet of ripe 
buff paper, headed by a printed extract from j 
the Boston Transcript of May 7, 1891 — evi- : 
dently now in the mail for perhaps the first 
time, since the letter itself was dated May 
12th. The printed extract read : 

. . . The Epictetus saying, as given by Walt Whitman in 
his own quite dilapidated physical case, is, "a little spark 
of soul dragging a great lummux of corpse-body clumsily 
to and fro around." 

Quite abruptly my failure was then revealed' 
in these terms: 

Couldn't remember distinctly enough to authenticate 
the desk (the pict: hereby returned as your note seems 

166 



THE DESK 

to involve) — but I know I had a good time in the Times 
— & heartily send my best respects & love to the boys 
one & all now there — I send my last photo : Tack it up 
if you like on the wall you all most congregate. 

Walt Whitman. 

The last of authentic voices had spoken. 
He who had written, 

Perhaps soon, some day or night while I am singing, 
my voice will suddenly cease, 

could no longer be debated as a possible wit- 
ness. At a stroke the quaint tradition was 
crippled. It was not obliterated; strangely, 
we all continued to believe more stubbornly 
than ever that it was Walt Whitman's desk. 
The very conscientiousness of the old man's 
pause (after half a century) seemed to rebuke 
not the tradition, but doubt itself. Yet some- 
thing beautiful in my dreams about the desk 
seemed to have suffered a hurt. And then, by 
an irony, in the following year the thing fell 
apart. I remember the huddle of the fragments 
in a corner. It had dissolved, as you might 
say, by the failure of a supporting faith. Or 
was it that, at almost the same time, the wild 
voice had "suddenly ceased"? 



THE CAMERA 



THE CAMERA 

1AFCADI0 HEARN'S Japanese wife puts 
i the case crisply: "He disliked liars, abuse 
of the weak, Prince Albert coats, white 
shirts, and the city of New York." 

I cannot recall those days in the despised 
city without consciousness of this plaintive 
echo. If, after the event, Hearn disliked New 
York, something of the invidious is removed 
by the revelation of prejudices that led to his 
burying himself at Matsue. He wanted his 
Japan as undiluted as he could get it. All that 
had gone before was shut out. 

When I saw him, Hearn was yet to find his 
peace. He had yet to be enthralled by the 
mountain pigeons at Kitabori and to read 
kwaidan in the shimmer of lotus ponds. I am 
here making note of a time when his restless 
detachment caught me as a singular and 
memorable appearance. 

I go back to that strange crib in which 
Henry Mills Alden edited Harper's Magazine, 
a pinched place radiant with Alden. I hear 
Alden tell me that I know all that is to be 

171 



THE CAMERA 

known about cameras, and will I do a great 
service for him and a certain Lafcadio Hearn, 
who wishes once more to go forth into the 
world, this time with one of the new cameras 
without legs? Hearn, I am to understand, is 
an odd chap, decidedly peculiar, in fact. It 
is essential that he should be able to make 
pictures on his travels. If I might not only 
choose the camera, but expound, with the 
necessary subtlety, the disposition of the thing, 
so that Hearn might be reconciled to it — if I 
might bring the two together, as it were — the 
implication is that the accomplishment will 
constitute a benevolence and a strategic 
triumph for which gratitude shall not be 
wanting. 

It was thus that I came to the meetings 
with Hearn in the turmoil of New York, and 
to know how much of apprehension could be 
kindled by a piece of mechanism that is now 
as familiar as a jackknife. Evidently there 
was an unspoken and an unwritten interval in 
which Hearn debated the undertaking as 
something momentous. I found vestiges of 
this interval in later fragmentary confessions. 
At last came the first letter, as in a kind of 
desperation : 

I have made up my mind about the camera, and have 
only a few more days to stay in N. York, — so that, if 

172 



THE CAMERA 

you can spare the time either this afternoon or to-morrow 
morning, I will avail myself of your very kind offer by 
asking you to meet me at Mr. Alden's office. 



During the whole of that excursion to the 
camera shop and the time of selection, analysis, 
and demonstration, his dismay seemed to in- 
crease, though this was to be translated mostly 
from the silences. He asked and listened. We 
returned again and again to elemental con- 
siderations. And again he receded. A quaint 
Martian, imperfectly contacting our civiliza- 
tion, listening, revolving our manifestations, 
and having constant difficulty in keeping his 
sense of touch with the immediate thing, 
might have given some such impression. 

Hearn was, indeed, profoundly mysterious 
to me. There was something behind his drab- 
ness that puzzled and often disquieted one who 
met him. It was as if he did not belong with 
the rest of us. He was utterly simple, yet his 
simplicity appeared as of one facet in an exotic 
complexity. His outward queerness was, of 
course, chiefly due to his eyes, of which I 
had the feeling that he was in some way tor- 
tured by them. The sign was not merely in 
the pupil or iris, but in the slant of the brows 
and the markings of the outer muscles that 
gave him, at an unfavorable angle, an effect of 
blight, while it added something immensely 

173 



THE CAMERA 

constrained or tentative in every movement or 
word. 

A truth of which first acquaintance could 
give one no more than a suspicion was that he 
was extraordinarily sensitive, sensitive quite 
beyond any usual meaning of that term. I 
am now sure that he guarded himself, by habit, 
yet with little dexterity, against the hazards 
growing out of this susceptibility as well as 
against the impulses that were ever ready to 
swing him aside. I am sure that more than 
once he was prompted to chuck the camera 
expedient altogether. One circumstance would 
have been a potent deterrent. The new travel 
articles were conditioned upon pictures. He 
would have seen his dream of a vaster adven- 
ture as involving civility toward this exacting 
companion. He was, indeed, forced to make 
terms with it, and there was the chance that 
he would feel that he was forced to make 
terms with me. Was I not the instrument by 
which he was acquiring a shackling incubus? 

I recall vividly the look into the recesses 
of the camera and his plaintive summing up 
of the crisis, "There are so many things to 
remember!" 

This was before the day of films, and there 
were more things to remember than remained 
to be thought of in later days. Yet no camera 
can be a respecter of absent-mindedness. 

174 



THE CAMERA 

There is the story of President Cleveland, who, 
on a fishing trip with Joseph Jefferson, pressed 
the button of his kodak throughout a whole 
day without ever turning the film. 

In the end Hearn went away with his "de- 
tective" — which is what the first hand cameras 
were called — and I did not hear from him for 
many months. It was after I had sent him a 
copy of Major Pond's circular announcing my 
picture-lecture, "Ourselves as Others See Us," 
that he wrote from Philadelphia: 

I feel the greatest possible interest in your undertak- 
ing. The circular is a beautiful revelation to me, and I 
hope if you ever conclude to publish a book on the sub- 
ject, illustrated in the delightful manner suggested by 
that circular, you will let me know, — wherever I may 
be. . . . 

I fear I am an absolute failure in the use of the Detec- 
tive, but I am not quite sure, because I could not get 
plates enough to spoil. During my stay in the West 
Indies communication was cut off by quarantine, & I 
could procure no material for love or money. I feel 
however that the camera is a superb success as an instru- 
ment; but as far as I have been able to learn there are 
few amateurs capable of thoroughly mastering it. Prac- 
tice and judgment are required in an extraordinary 
degree. 

"In the spring of the twenty-third year of 
Meiji" (1891) Hearn reached Matsue. I had 
one letter from Kobe, a brief line of inquiry 

175 



THE CAMERA 

as to an address. My camera pupil had slipped 
over the horizon into his dream country. He 
had found his Place, his companion, his voices 
that said Papa-san. He had found the beauty 
that could be for him an eternal shrine and 
wonder. His passion for Japan was one of 
those love affairs that last. 



THE ELEVEN O'CLOCK 



THE ELEVEN O'CLOCK 

THAT curious group in the studio of 
William M. Chase will perhaps excuse a 
further allusion to the camera. 
I had been showing Chase, with an ama- 
teur's emotions, negatives gathered for the 
picture-talk on "Ourselves as Others See Us," 
that first ambitious exploitation for the screen 
of a photography that was then surprising 
simply because it was "instantaneous." Chase 
himself had given cordial help, through nega- 
tives of his own, and by suggestion as to the 
work of others. His studio at that time was 
one of the most noteworthy in America. 
Probably it was the most picturesque on this 
side of the water, most romantically sug- 
gestive of the atelier tradition. You found it 
j on the left as you groped into the brownish 
foyer of the Tenth Street studio building, and 
you heard the murmur of the harp on the door 
when Chase was bidding you enter. The 
smaller room into which you first came was 
charmingly littered with colorful things, in 
itself a bit of chromatic magic. But the real 

179 



THE ELEVEN O'CLOCK 

wonder lay in the larger, high-ceilinged room 
beyond, where hanging rugs, a subtle sheen in 
draperies, an Oriental significance in corner 
detail, and flashes of painted poetry combined 
to spell studio in the end-of-the-century terms. 
In such terms the place was romantic; and it 
seemed to be the inevitable background to 
Chase. However they might quarrel upon 
other points, the critics yielded a unanimity as 
to Chase's mastery in color, and it was un- 
thinkable that in placing a bit of copper or 
bronze, in flinging any decorative trophy, or 
in making room for the processes of mere work 
he should by any chance fail of the color chord 
or evoke other than a fascinating dissonance. 

In the midst of this scene Chase could seem 
as confirmatory of tradition as anything in his 
surroundings. He reminded one of Paris. 
Certain of his gestures, particularly in these 
middle years, were curiously and spontaneously 
French. A Latin quickness gave animation 
to his native enthusiasm; yet he was always 
the American, and always Chase, as markedly 
individual as his friend Whistler. 

Suddenly, in the course of our talk, Chase 
flung out his arms. 

"I have it!" he exclaimed. "Whistler did 
his Ten o' Clocks. You shall go him one better. 
You shall give an Eleven o' Clock." 

Perhaps I looked dismayed. At all events, 
180 



THE ELEVEN O'CLOCK 

he had a torrential explanation aimed to per- 
suade me. There was a pending first night of 
the Society of American Artists. After the 
reception he would bring the "crowd" down 
to the studio and I should set up my screen 
and perform. "They have no idea," said 
Chase, "of the charm of these photographic 
records of life. There are bully things there. 
They know you as a critic. Let them see you 
and hear you as an artist. They will be 
amazed at what they shall see. And they will 
listen with tremendous interest." 

Chase was wrong about the listening; at 
least that was my impression in the midst of 
the experiment. The crowd came. A gather- 
ing so distinguished could scarcely have been 
accomplished except by an expedient such as 
Chase had devised. The turning off of the 
lights, essential to the functioning of the 
stereopticon, happened mercifully, for I was 
appalled by the presence of the celebrities 
whose work I had had the impudence to ap- 
praise in print, and who now had me in their 
hands. La Farge, Weir, Wiles, Thayer, Beck- 
with, Robert Blum, Champney, Twachtman, 
J. G. Brown, George Innes, Elihu Vedder, St. 
Gaudens, W. J. Baer — there was twoscore of 
them; and they did listen to my introduction, 
before the lights dimmed and the pictures 
began. After that the audience took charge 
13 181 



THE ELEVEN O'CLOCK 

of the occasion. I think you would say that it 
was an appreciative audience, but the appre- 
ciation took an embarrassing form. A picture 
of New York bootblacks in action elicited a 
glad recognizing shout. "A perfect J. G. 
Brown!" A Park scene drew forth, "A Chase I 
to the life!" "Ah! a Thayer!" was the quick 
comment upon a tenement Madonna. And j 
when a street vista included one of New York's 
worst atrocities of sculpture there was a 
groaning voice to say, "Imagine how St. 
Gaudens feels!" Of course the comment 
went farther. Voices at the back fell into 
discussions as to composition. One spectator f 
gave a despairing effect to the drawling remark : 
"No use. Nature is awful!" — then in another 
moment the tone changed sharply: "Ah! As 
Jimmy would say, Nature's looking up." 

In other words, my audience had a good | 
time. When I caught the pace, when I found 
my part in the orchestral effect, all went well 
enough, save that to be released occasionally 1 
to the solo became an acutely difficult matter. | 
At the time it was natural to minimize the i 
exclamations of astonishment and approval, i 
but the total of recollection gives to these evi- r 
dences a better place. There could be no real ! 
doubt as to the holding power of the pictures ] 
selected, and I came to realize how richly 
profitable that experience had been to the lec- 

182 



THE ELEVEN O'CLOCK 

turer who lectured so little. How much we 
should get from audiences — of chastening and 
of cheer too — if their reactions were always 
audible! 

My own interest in that collection of pic- 
tures, which was afterward amplified for the 
purposes of a talk on photography in its rela- 
tions to art at the National Academy and 
elsewhere, lies in the fact that certain of its 

I related groups led me to debate the possibility 

I of writing a screen story and of casting and 
photographing it into pictorial drama. The 
artists were all but unanimous in the opinion 
that the thing couldn't be done. As one of 
them put it: "You know how stiff a deliber- 
ately made photographic group is. Well, 
imagine a succession of them!" 

Nevertheless I went to work, "registering" 

i the images so that the screen effect was of a 
"slow movie," though no such term was 
thought of at a time when film and full motion 
had yet to happen. The monologue in the 

I dark related the fragments of conversation and 
all else that could not be told by the pictures. 
Among many descriptive terms, "picture play" 
met with the greatest favor. Thus "Miss 
Jerry," the first screen drama, came to be pro- 
duced in 1894. Among all the early com- 
ments on that adventure (four plays cover a 
period of six years), one brings perhaps the 

183 



THE ELEVEN O'CLOCK 

warmest surviving feeling, doubtless because 
of something in the vivid image of the man. 
I am thinking of the ejaculation of Dr. Edward 
Everett Hale: "Black, this idea of a play in 
pictures is so inevitable that I'm mortified to 
think I didn't invent it myself!" 



COINCIDENCES 



COINCIDENCES 

f I ^HERE can be extraordinary sarcasms in 
coincidence. One night a thief made off 
with my overcoat from a restaurant. 
The restaurant was not of the sort in which 
one is admonished to be alert. Moreover, I 
had never been robbed of anything in my life. 
I was utterly without admonitory experience. 
Naturally, the incident made a rather pro- 
found impression. The weather happened to 
deepen that impression. It was within the 
hour that I happened to open my Bible to 
verify the location of the verse from which I 
took the title of a certain book. And in the 
verse immediately preceding I read, with an 
entirely new sense of their significance, these 
startling words: "Blessed is he that watcheth 
and keepeth his garments." 

On a certain afternoon I was reading a book 
in a street car. The book was Julian Haw- 
thorne's The Great Bank Robbery. Its picture 
of a beautiful, cultivated, and socially im- 
portant woman who becomes fascinated by a 

187 



COINCIDENCES 

crook, and under the mesmeric influence of the 
infatuation actually steals the secret of a safe, 
set up a lively speculation in my mind. The 
story was supposed to be founded upon fact — 
really to transcribe the experiences of a known 
detective — and the psychology of the thing 
thus acquired more than merely a speculative 
interest. All the rest of the story might be 
true, or be a free transcription of fact, but 
could this woman be true? I lowered the book 
in that moment of mental wrestling with 
skepticism and became conscious that a girl 
in a greenish-blue dress sat diagonally opposite 
in the car. It occurred to me that she was 
very pretty, perhaps even beautiful, and that 
especially she had about her something ex- 
quisite, as of a fine breed, that stood out 
against the profane average of the public 
huddle. The truth is that I was awed and 
thrust quite into the mood of a deeper skepti- 
cism about the book. Could a girl like that, 
for example, do a coarse, unscrupulous thing, a 
criminal thing at the behest of any man or 
any emotion? It was incredible. Hawthorne's 
fiction began to look tawdry, like a trick to 
make a melodrama. I should have to say so in 
my review. Then the car came to a stop. The 
girl opposite arose. A man on the front 
platform got off. So did a man on the rear 
platform who had been standing beside the 

188 



COINCIDENCES 



conductor. Presently I saw that the girl was 
between them in the street, and when I glanced 
backward I became aware that the three figures 
disappeared into the Greene Avenue police 
station. In a state of disturbed curiosity I 
went to the conductor. The girl? That was 
Jenny Hansen. The coppers called her the 
queen of the shoplifters. 

Again : And note that the scene is once more 
a public conveyance and that once more I am 
reviewing. Of course a reviewer should be 
wearing a velvet jacket and be seated in a 
large place, graciously quiet, and framed 
against the intrusions of mere life by towering 
barricades of books. Here, attuned and shel- 
tered, the reviewer should measure the precise 
degree in which the print in hand synchronizes 
with Literature. But I was in the cross seat 
of an elevated train. In that day elevated 
trains were operated by steam, and this one 
was bowling along at what seemed to be 
a hastening rate. My book was Virginia Tit- 
comb's Mind Cure on a Material Basis, 
then a comparatively new subject. I reached 
a paragraph in which there was speculation 
upon the ultimate power of thought and will 
to influence external things. Call it creative 
imagination, mediumistic projection, or the 
faith that moves mountains, this power, by 
whatever name, latent or limited, suggested 

189 



COINCIDENCES 

enormous potentialities. Yet with the most 
eager cordiality toward the theory one could 
not avoid bewilderment as to the boundaries. 
One might influence his own chemistry. This 
was already admitted. Would it be held that 
wholly external matter might, as in the Mira- 
cles, yield to the white heat of individual wish? 
Fancy, I said to myself, willing, willing fiercely 
and with a tremendous concentration, that this 
train, now midway of two stations, should 
come to an utter halt, that I, taking the train 
by the throat, as it were, should screech to it, 
"Stop!" At that instant (the instant is essen- 
tial to my drama) the train did halt, with so 
complete a suddenness, with a sharpness so 
preposterously violent, that I was thrown 
forward against the seat in front, to the damage 
of my face. A child fell to the floor of the car. 
One or two women screamed in fright. For 
another instant, before there could be room 
for reason, I had the thrill of an absolutely 
apocalyptic confirmation, with a twinge that 
blended chagrin and awe. The world had, at a 
stroke, acquired a fearful, a prodigious in- 
stability. Nothing is too fantastic to last for 
a second. When I thrust my head out of the 
window (in company with a dozen others) I 
discovered that the engineer had quite per- 
emptorily changed his mind and decided to 

190 



COINCIDENCES 

take water at a huge tank which hung about 
a hundred feet from the point where I had 
applied the mental brakes. 

Others may have had prof ounder experience. 
These are my three perfect coincidences. 



WHAT'S IN A PLACE ? 



WHAT'S IN A PLACE? 

OF course, as a person born in New York 
City I cannot pretend to forget that 
there is something disqualifying about 
being native when one is still to be found in 
the place of his nativity. It is true that a 
born New-Yorker shares the common acquittal 
i as to complicity in such a matter. Even those 
who admit that one might better have been born 
somewhere else do not go so far as to suggest 
that the hazard of being born in New York 
1 is one which he could have avoided, though 
facing the risk of ending where he began is 
remarked with an effect of indicating question- 
able taste. It does not avail that a born New- 
Yorker may have a wholesome sense of the 
sins he has inherited — perhaps even of those 
to which he has given nourishment. There is 
an American implication that being discovered 
where you were born violates a kind of code. 
It simply isn't done. 

A sense of this affects me poignantly when I 
find myself at one of those dinners, so frequent 

195 



WHAT'S IN A PLACE? 

in New York, that celebrate some remote 
county of my own state or some noble other 
state of the Union. It is at one of these 
festivals that one realizes most sharply the im- 
perativeness of unfolding and of being remarked 
in a region other than his birthplace. When I 
sit at a banqueting board, with a man beside 
me who is modest about everything but Mis- 
souri, and hear the orators extol the county or 
the state that produced them; when I hear 
those impassioned allusions to a sky that is 
bluer, grass that is greener, and water that is 
wetter than any other on God's fair footstool — 
I feel depressed and inferior. When I hear 
about the old swimming hole and realize that 
I had nothing but the Atlantic Ocean; when 1 
must confess to myself that I never was chased 
by a constable, but only by a policeman; 
especially when it is borne in upon me that one 
cannot feel or say these things about a place 
when he is there, that only when he is properly 
somewhere else can he be permitted to express 
his natural emotions of native pride — I experi- 
ence a sheepish pang. If I had gone forth or 
come forth like others; if I had heard the far 
call and had seen the beckoning finger; if that 
place-appeal to the imagination which consti- 
tutes so vital an element of adventure had not 
come from my own island — if I had not found 
romance where Adam found his, in the home 

196 



WHAT'S IN A PLACE? 

lot — I too might have enjoyed this birthright 
of a distant birthplace. 

No apology is offered for the personal digres- 
sion, not only because it sets forth a really 
important psychology, but because it seems to 
bear a relation to the matter here specifically 
in mind — namely, certain new (and very old) 
debates as to the native, the "characteristic," 
in American life. It might pay to pause for 
consideration of the migrating impulse as a 
factor in sociology. But that is another com- 
plex. It is essential to stick to the quarrel 
point. If you had been born in New York, 
and were still there, the quarrel point would 
hold you; the fact that New York, for example, 
is not "characteristic" enough, and that its 
failure to be characteristic is somehow mixed 
i up with its failure to be original, would acquire 
ifor you, in the course of time, the interest of 
i an accusatory revelation. 

America was very young when it formed the 
habit of thinking about its " difference." There 
was no comfort for a visitor who did not admit, 
or proclaim, and then expound this difference. 
Being different became a preoccupation, some- 
times a mania, often a business. The theory 
that we were essentially different introduced a 
tieavy strain. Only being enormously busy 
:ould assure a continued difference. If being 
American was being different, then not being 
14 197 



WHAT'S IN A PLACE? 

different in any conspicuous or essential quality- 
was not being American. You will see at a 
glance how intricate life could become under 
an obligation so insistent. 

It is as when we say to the humorist that he 
must be not only as funny as before, but that 
to seem as funny he must be funnier than 
ever. American efficiency remarks very sternly 
to the youth that to do as well he must do 
better. We can't simply stay different. We 
must hustle, or when we are not looking our 
difference will have melted or dried up or 
stiffened or somehow ceased to be different. 

Inevitably our difference moved westward, 
and then it seems to have begun, like the 
center of population, to roll back. Inevitably, 
too, this produced an uneven thickness in the 
difference. It was the paradox that in new 
spots it was thicker, as of something laid on 
with a dripping brush. And very early began 
the quarrel as to which places were entitled to 
be regarded as most American. The quarrel 
was not introduced by an outlander. It was ) 
our own affair. We always told the outlander \ 
about it when he came. This was necessary, 
because without information he was as likely 3 
as not, when he stepped ashore, to think he i 
had landed in America. 

"Sh-sh!" some one was sure to mutter to j 
the outlander, with an admonishing sign 

198 



WHAT'S IN A PLACE? 

"Don't make the mistake of thinking that 
this is America. The real America is westward. 
Wait awhile." 

There was the possibility that the newcomer 
might assume that going westward as far as 
he could he should find the utmost America, 
and it became a kind of humiliation, having 
reached a delightf ully sophisticated other coast, 
to discover that the realest America was some- 
where in between — that he had walked over it 
without knowing, or had slept through it on 
a night train. Our visitors usually have been 
extremely polite. Most of them have shown a 
disposition to feel what they ought to feel; 
and it must often be a bewildering, if not a 
downright painful thing, while wishing to be 
nice about it, to suffer an uncertainty so large 
in sheer miles and to fumble for the essential 
in a matter which the native can indicate with 
a gesture without being adept in indicating by 
any decipherable diagram or locus classicus. 

It is to be suspected that our visitors have 
often gone away with a secreted conviction 
| that our most marked collective difference is 
! this national anxiety about difference. What- 
ever may come to the onlooker by oral com- 
munication, there can be no question that our 
written confessions would convey to him an 
amazing solicitude as to regional integrity. 
The European need not cross the sea to know 

199 



WHAT'S IN A PLACE? 

that Americans worry about their originality, 
and especially about its apportionment. He 
needs no physical contact to know that we are 
immensely concerned not only about our title 
deeds to humor and frankness and push and 
difference, but about the order of geographical 
precedence in these matters. We like to think 
that we have obliterated effete lines of social 
caste, yet we are acutely jealous, according to 
many of the critics, of a decent ordering in our 
"originality " relations. If complete originality 
must have the head of the table, the assumption 
seems to be that only an unrelenting critical 
Burke can accomplish an orderly seating. 

Thirty years ago I read a learned opinion to 
the effect that trying to "get" American life 
was like trying to estimate a landscape through 
the window of a rapidly moving train. The 
comment was not made by a foreigner. It was 
made by an American writer who was, I am 
sure, profoundly concerned over the need to 
transcribe the whole of America into something 
decorously and even devoutly "native." Evi- 
dently he believed that "the great American 
novel" would represent a huge encyclopedic 
cross section of the Republic, and he resented 
the squirming activity of the "material." 
How can you make a cross section of a thing 
that squirms? The implication was that Eu- 
rope would hold still while you sketched it, 

200 



WHAT'S IN A PLACE? 

but that nothing satisfactory could be done 
with a subject that refused to be decently- 
quiet, that was restless like a baby in a photo- 
graph gallery. 

The comment I am recalling had been made 
before. It has been repeated many times since. 
It will be offered again. Frenchmen say some 
equivalent thing about Paris. Once Paris was 
fixed. Now landmarks are disappearing. Nat- 
urally landmarks were always disappearing and 
all eras have been eras of transition. But this 
suggestion is repugnant to a certain sort of per- 
son — the sort of person who can accept fore- 
ground evidence of change, but is offended by 
the thought that change may always have 
been busy. The cautious find a prop in the 
static, and these are often encouraged by his- 
torians, who sometimes seem willing to let us 
believe that certain periods were wholly with- 
out movement. One gets the impression that 
historians often hold back movement until the 
proper place in a chapter. To give human evo- 
lution this jerky advance is plainly preferred as 
adding "snap" to its drama. 

At all events, persons of a standardizing 
habit want images to stay very still, to be not 
only very still, but to give assurance that they 
are not by any chance to move unduly and 

S disqualify the record. If anything is missing 
in report of American life it is quite possible 

201 






WHAT'S IN A; PLACE? 

to believe that it is not because American life 
is in transition, but because this uproariously- 
funny thought about transition and its dis- 
qualifying effects has managed to creep even 
into creative minds. 

And while we wonder why there is no pos- 
sible thrill in the transitional, why only the 
settled can be described, here comes the accu- 
sation that New York must be dismissed as too 
settled to be characteristic. Since the transi- 
tional won't stay still to be written, and the 
settled isn't native enough to be written, the 
dilemma surely is complete. Chicago, too, is 
accused of hardening into unavailability. The 
truth is that Chicago is as unlike Mobile as 
New York is unlike Seattle. This may be 
admitted. It is the small town, of New Eng- 
land, of the South, of the Middle West, of the 
Coast, that is aspersed by the uniformity label 
— or crowned as "characteristic." 

Only the untraveled — or the merely train 
traveled — believe that small towns of any 
section have a flat uniformity. It is always an 
alien race of whose members we are quick to 
say, "They are all alike," and it is the unknown 
neighbor who sinks into type obscurity. Really 
to know a town, big or little, is to experience 
the displacement of type by personality. To 
have studied American cities from San Fran- 
cisco to Savannah; to have felt the throb under 

202 



WHAT'S IN A PLACE? 

the careless mask of small towns; to have 
haunted hundreds of villages that are as 
different as men, that are too busy with 
human problems to know anything about 
type obligations, is to find fresh absurdity in 
the solemn or flippant application of type 
labels. 

The astounding thing is not blunder as to 
likeness or unlikeness in American centers, but 
the pretense that these relativities have some 
bearing on the duties of art. One might wonder 
whether this is a purely American pretense. 
No painter or novelist who describes London 
apologizes because London is not native as 
Normanby is native. No violent unlikeness of 
Paris as compared with Carcassonne invalidates 
the Frenchness of anything written about the 
capital. "Madame Bovary" is not accused of 
having failed to reflect Bordeaux. Mr. Hardy 
may choose Wessex with an impunity equal to 
that yielded to Mr. Conrad in his wanderings 
through the seven seas. 

American writers have shown a disposition 
to accept region as an opportunity rather than 
as an obligation, yet American writers have 
repeatedly encountered the critical reminder 
that our literature might have been more racy 
of the soil if it had been more place-conscious. 
Again and again writers have been urged to 
consider whether they might not be more 

203 



x WHAT'S IN A PLACE? 

native in effect by taking a train; unless it had 
been agreed that they were correctly placed, 
in which case they were attacked, sometimes 
violently, for daring to move. Awkwardly, 
Walt Whitman liked Broadway, and could 
select so vulgar and metropolitan a subject as 
the Brooklyn ferry. Poe also was foolishly 
New-Yorkish; Howells, who should have been 
warned by tradition, did not go back to 
Martins Ferry, but to New York; and O. 
Henry actually pretended that New York was 
a mine of American romance. Of course the 
arch - offenders were Bret Harte and Henry 
James, who moved all the way to London. 
These, doubtless, should be set aside as beyond 
the pale. 

Although, as I have suggested, my ambiguous 
position as a born New-Yorker may be dis- 
qualifying, I venture the admission that New 
York does not seem to me to be the very 
"original." To be sure, I have never visited 
any town, small or large, that did not in some 
degree reflect the influence of other towns. 
The trouble is that New York has been in- 
dicted for going too far in reflecting the influ- 
ence of Europe. That imputation is always 
shocking. Yet some town has to bear the re- 
sponsibility of filtering foreign influences, and 
even a town thus engaged must present some 
sort of a spectacle. It still remains a human 

204 



WHAT'S IN A PLACE? 

circumstance such as it is. I have heard it 
said that New York cannot be considered as 
"American" because it is "full of foreigners." 
But even as a place full of foreigners it is a 
place in America, and the foreigners are all 
persons. For that matter, the United States 
has always been full of foreigners. The image 
of the United States that shines before the 
world would be a trifle ironic if a good many 
of our towns were not "full of foreigners." 
If founders of the Republic could be foreigners 
— well, the foreigner notion is pretty well 
answered in our literature, if not always in our 
parlor civics. 

New York's smug insularity, like the in- 
sularity of older Rome or newer London, is 
not less a reality because it is exasperating or 
because its resemblances are unfortunate. If 
a village in Iowa is "characteristic" — that is, 
like something else — a Broadway is whatever 
it is for the same simple human reasons. Be- 
cause both are states of mind, the trite and the 
unique establish their individual blend. As 
for New York's assumption that it is the center 
of things, I admit that this expresses one of 
its most commonplace habits. Only one who 
has ransacked the United States can know, of 
fact, how completely trite this trait is. There 
is nothing unrighteous about the assumption. 
It is natural; perhaps it is inherently indis- 

205 



WHAT'S IN A PLACE? 

pensable. An individual or a group that does 
not intuitively accept the idea of being at the 
center is probably abnormal and open to 
suspicion. Very likely the claim or the admis- 
sion, to be graceful, needs an appropriate tone 
of voice. The artifice we call modesty has its 
grades. The big place needs a big modesty, 
and it doesn't always have it. 

New York's disqualifying reflections of Eu- 
rope are indicated as particularly serious in an 
art consideration. "Difference" means, above 
all else, difference from Europe. The eagerness 
to find parts of America that are sufficiently 
different from Europe can, as I have sug- 
gested, reach the fervidness of a patriotic 
mania. Since we have established the prin- 
ciple of measuring individual Americanism in 
percentages, it may be that towns will suffer 
the same estimate, and that if a town in Con- 
necticut or Georgia or Oregon shows a failed 
percentage it will become a perilous thing to 
get itself written. 

I should not overlook the fact that to "sell" 
ourselves abroad we must have the expected 
seasoning. The movies, finding a profitable 
foreign market, adroitly perpetuated an ob- 
solete wildness in Western scenes. Europe is 
not to be amused by anything American that 
is not more than a little raw. Yet I have not 
discovered that the best interpreters of life 

206 



WHAT'S IN A PLACE? 

in America have done their writing with an eye 
on Europe. 

Probably there is no real danger that 
any novelist who is worth his salt will be 
made place-conscious in an inhibiting degree 
by any grotesque maunderings about native- 
ness, though the novelist may find diversion 
in studying place-consciousness as a factor. 
It may be that as a factor he might find it to 
have the weight of more than a joke. In his 
serious moods he may conclude that the peer- 
ing, puttering analyses of subject, the appre- 
hensive discrimination between this and that 
spot, this and that character, as perfectly or 
imperfectly " American," was never more fu- 
tile, never more antipathetic to the hungers of 
the world, than at this hour. Samuel Butler 
thought that America was not a good place in 
which to be a genius. He may have been right. 
But probably it is as good a place in which to 
be artistically honest as any that is available 
at the moment. 

The novelist may have his personal regret 
that a town is not more original, if originality 
seems to him important, just as he might 
lament the same thing about a man. Yet it 
may not seem to him imperative that he should 
write about original towns or original men 
only. He may have awakened to the fact 
that the important thing is not that the sub- 

207 



WHAT'S IN A PLACE? 

ject should be original, but that the artist 
should be original — by being honest, for exam- 
ple. He may have realized that complete 
honesty is always original; that if no two 
thumbprints are alike, no two soulprints are 
alike, either. If he saw the highest importance 
not in difference, but in truth, he might set to 
work trying to understand the life at hand, 
wherever it was, and trying to convey a sense 
of that life to lives elsewhere. He might do 
this upon a theory that it is more creative to 
tell the utter truth about a commonplace man 
than merely to elaborate the divergences of a 
"different" one — because he thought the com- 
monplaceness of misunderstanding to be the 
ultimate ugliness, either in patriotism or in 
art. Naturally, most men and most places 
are commonplace. Real pictures of either 
continue to have the rarity of a highly elusive 
gem. While men, outwardly at least, remain 
much the same from year to year, expressions 
of truth will ever be changing, ever flashing 
new phases of beauty. 

Great art has never begun in a feverish 
search for something "native." If great art 
has had heat, that quality has shone in the 
white intensity of its communication. The 
poet doesn't shun the clouds because they have 
been "done," or because they haven't a "na- 
tive" quality. The kind of mind that can 

208 



WHAT'S IN A PLACE? 

separate human elements of material, not as a 
matter of personal choice, but as if there could 
be a fundamental differentiation of verity, is 
the kind of mind that can rack itself to de- 
termine whether the novel is "a true art form." 
True art form ! Maybe we need some one with 
the exalted energy of a Nazarene to break the 
face of dogma, to point out vigorously that 
the human creature is It, that humanities, in 
Russia or on Broadways, give a gray cast to 
every other possible consideration, including 
those of geography and of art. If a man has 
a passion boiling in him it does not matter 
whether he crouches in a rice field of the South 
or runs a steel cage in a skyscraper. If a 
woman's nerves go to smash it doesn't matter 
whether her washtub and her babies are in a 
ranch house or in a tenement. The bitter is 
not more nor less real by being " native" or in 
the right county. 

In short, native novels will continue to be 
written by artists who can forget long enough 
that they are themselves native, who can 
forget long enough that they or their subjects 
must be 100 per cent., who can forget bound- 
aries, "art forms," anxieties about originality, 
or "the great American novel." The real 
scene of every creative work is the heart of the 
artist; nothing is real to him until he has 
found it there; which is to say that the ulti- 

209 



WHAT'S IN A PLACE? 

mate need of the artist is not merely that he 
should "know his subject" and express a place. 
It is that he should, if he has the luck, know 
himself and express humanity. A platitude, 
naturally. But the elemental is never original. 
This may explain why self-conscious eagerness 
so often misses it altogether. 



HEROINE COMPLEXES 



HEROINE COMPLEXES 

ANY obligation may become irksome; even 
A\ a beautiful obligation, one that in itself 
begins pleasantly, that in itself intrigues 
the fancy and threatens comfortably to chloro- 
form the conscience. For example, to become 
the literary father of some delightful or even 
moderately entertaining girl offers a natural 
inflation to vanity. One may have dreamed 
of heroines. Then perhaps the tempter whis- 
pers, offering a poised wand (inked), "Invoke 
your own!" But when one yields, when the 
perilous necromancy, that so easily seems like 
no magic at all, has given the ink of life to a 
veritable person, and he has, in the course of 
time, become parentally fond, the trouble 
begins. In the end he is told that the child 
whose waywardness he had hoped to conceal 
is very badly brought up. And you know how 
sensitive fathers are. 

It was some sense of this predicament that 
led me, rather petulantly, to remark to the 
girl with the questioning eyes that I can't 

is 213 



HEROINE COMPLEXES 

manage women, even in books. Of course, to 
make my point I had to drag in the living 
women. What is a sex between debaters? 

At this the girl with the questioning eyes 
asked, in her charming vernacular, "What do 
you mean, manage?" 

"I mean," I said, "make them do what they 
ought to do. In real life a man is inclined, 
occasionally, to think he has done it. To be 
specific, there are cases where a woman gives 
a plain 'Yes' to a proposal of marriage. Hav- 
ing accomplished the categorical, a man is 
ready to believe any foolish thing. Under 
such circumstances he will go forward quite 
confidently with all sorts of diagrams. The 
veil of the future lifts. He knows just how 
things are going to be. But what really does 
happen afterward? Does the woman ever fail, 
at the right time, to remind the man that there 
were others, and even that, after all, she might 
have done better? Of course she does these 
things for his good. She has told me so. 
Marrying a man would, after all, be a bit too 
much for his conceit if there weren't ways of 
qualifying the thing afterward. Some women 
go pretty far, if we may judge from the reports. 
Evidently some of them overdo it. But I sup- 
pose their motives are sound. Discipline must 
be maintained." 

Wasn't it that women were getting to be 
214 



HEROINE COMPLEXES 

more independent or something? suggested the 
girl with the questioning eyes. 

There is more to it than that, I insisted; 
something more intricate; not merely the 
development of simple initiative, but the re- 
sult, it may be, of some theory of amplified, of 
progressive, revelation. Isn't there a possible 
symbolism in the fact that she has covered her 
ears and accentuated her lips? When the 
modern (Edipus tries to read the lips of the 
Sphinx he sees red — lots of it, applied while he 
waits. 

The whole history of man and woman makes 
it clear (I said to the girl) that some things have 
reached men very slowly. First, man hit 
woman with a club (his clubs have always been 
an annoyance to her). Then she was sold to 
him — without any make-believe. Later on 
there was the pretense of his asking her. After 
that came an institution called Gallantry, a 
pretty nasty affair, usually. By and by she 
began to pretend that she had something to 
do with the choice. For a long time she actu- 
ally has been making a choice — that is, taking 
the best she has happened to find. The notion 
that she doesn't have to marry at all unless 
she wants to — that notion came last — was a 
stunning blow to men. It changed the entire 
technic of the masculine process, and I don't 
think women care to lose, before marriage or 

215 



HEROINE COMPLEXES 

after, the advantage of the theory and man's 
knowledge of it. 

This makes managing women an impossi- 
bility. The whole scheme of managing them 
was based on conditions that are obsolete. 
Naturally, there are women who will pretend 
to be manageable, and naturally these are 
managed least. 

"But in a book — " began the girl with the 
questioning eyes. 

Yes, it is natural (I pointed out) to jump at 
the conclusion that everything is different in 
a book. But in a book the women are still 
women, if the author has made them real, and 
if the author is a man he is certain to find that 
they will get away from him. I know what I 
am talking about. Any appearance of levity 
only hides the bitterness of experience. ... I 
have one girl in mind. I liked her immensely. 
Probably that was what made me too easy. 
I ought to have been firm. Only a misogynist 
should write a story with love in it. He could 
keep cool. 

I suppose the love struggles of authors will 
never quite adequately be told. I don't mean 
the kind of struggle authors have in the sordid 
world. These have been told enough. After 
the author is dead his foolishest love letters 
come under the spotlight, especially if anyone 
finds a really good reason why they shouldn't. 

216 



HEROINE COMPLEXES 

I am thinking of the struggles he has with the 
most unmanageable women of all — the women 
he creates. He may start off with the intention 
of holding them harshly in hand. If they 
obeyed him he would know they weren't real. 
That's his big problem. Being a human man 
as well as an author, he'd rather have them real 
than obedient. But this not only makes him a 
lot of work, but raises the devil with plots. 

Holding what you would call a confidential 
relation, you might think (I said to the girl) 
that the author would know what his heroine 
was going to do next and act accordingly — get 
around and head her off. But in a single para- 
graph she may swing into an entirely unex- 
pected direction and get a lead that leaves him 
breathless. In that case the author has to be 
what is colloquially known as a fast worker to 
save any of his self-respect. 

In books, as in life, there are, too, other 
people to think of. We say of lovers in real 
life, "They were made for each other," though 
generally they are most likely to say that of 
themselves. What happens when two people 
the author has made for each other sulk about 
pairing, refuse to see that they are made for 
each other, I leave you to imagine. The women 
make the most trouble. It is as if, even in 
books, they hated arranged marriages, or 
arranged independence, either. 

217 



HEROINE COMPLEXES 

"You see," I said to the girl with the ques- 
tioning eyes, "I'm putting the blame upon the 
women, quite as usual. But if a male author 
weren't male he wouldn't be human. And if 
he weren't human he wouldn't try to write. 
And there you are." 

After all, the girl with the eyes had a specific 
case, which was annoying, and I almost told 
her so. "You must not go into such things," 
I said. "I am supposed to leave the reader 
to get all that. You know, of course, that it 
is wrong to end happily; that is to say, it is 
strategically reprehensible. It connotes some- 
thing unpleasant — so many stupid things end 
happily. It is right enough in life, if you can 
manage it. But for the same reason that 
divorces are entertaining and that a happy 
couple can be very trying, only something at 
least debatable has any artistic possibilities. 
This is why it is disastrous to fall in love with 
your own heroine. As a man you want her to 
be happy. As an artist you must make her 
miserable." 

"I see," said the girl with the questioning 
eyes. 

But I was sure that she didn't. I was talk- 
ing through her hat. 



I 

ON BROADWAY 



ON BROADWAY 

FOR most of us a street is a stage setting in 
the drama of memory. Objectively it may 
call up, in a first meeting, other scenes, 
other times. It may suggest an Alhambra, a 
Naples, or a Haymarket. It may then invite 
or repel. If we are benighted enough to believe 
that God made the country and man made the 
town; if we are incapable of seeing that a sky- 
scraper is as natural as a lark's nest; if we are 
infected by the sort of reactionary sestheticism 
that sees a jumble in Europe as picturesque 
and romantic, and in America as haphazard 
and vulgar, then a New York street, for exam- 
ple, can give text for copious corrective melan- 
choly. At the last, Doctor Johnson was "will- 
ing to call a man a good man on easier terms 
than heretofore." When we have seen streets 
enough in towns enough, without missing the 
people in them, we are able to call a street an 
interesting street without suffering so sharp a 
twinge in our bigotry nerve. 

But above all the qualities a street may hold 
as a pictorial fact shines that of its office as 

221 



ON BROADWAY 

background to individual experience. In a 
large way a street may be known to us by the 
company it keeps ; in memory it is likely to get 
its sharpest illumination from significant faces 
we recall, and which in turn recall the street. 
The human streams of Broadway melt like a 
cloud. The figures of memory are indelibly 
silhouetted. In the vast fantastic hush of mid- 
night those downtown reaches hold for me a 
whispering Babel. From the faint yet piercing 
chorus I can attempt to sort out and fit to the 
belonging faces the voices of vanished men. 
And a dozen miles to the north, where the street 
of the seven sins worms its course among the 
rocks to Spuyten Duyvil — brazenly maintain- 
ing to the brink of its island, "I am Broad- 
way!" — equally good private reasons prepare 
me for spectral echoes. 

So much for being born a little way off; for 
beginning with it as the ultimate magic; for 
having seen it youthfully as a great Thing, 
sometimes bannered, sometimes disemboweled, 
here rearing its vertebra like an angry leviathan 
or coughing out a tooth, there fuming to heaven, 
with its hundred thousand eyes glaring fever- 
ishly; for having learned to know something 
of its ironies and to accept it as a symbol and 
illustration of eternal change. I have wan- 
dered in it as a great path on which glittered 
the peculiar treasure of kings, and I have 

222 



ON BROADWAY 

shambled there when I felt as if, like the Play- 
boy, I were "living lonesome in the world." I 
have thought of it as the epitome of length, and 
as expressing an incorrigible haughtiness of 
height. It has seemed that it must be seared 
by the torches of endless processions, or that 
cheering must be its preoccupation. Then 
again, the catafalque of Grant, with the inky 
trappings and the hordes of marchers, moving 
with a thrilling slowness between those primeval 
telegraph poles, seemed to promise that it 
would be permanently sobered. But it has 
never been permanently anything but restless. 
One might say that temperamentally it had 
always been a bit stagy. History helps the 
impression. But history is another matter. 
This writing represents the sheer egoism of 
personal reaction, which can be stagy, too, on 
occasion, especially when boy images are mixed 
up with the foundations of the picture. The 
truth is that I see my own boy figure at the 
very foot of the street, returning after a wild 
adventure in Europe. That cheese-box affair, 
Castle Garden, which had been a fearsome fort, 
then Jenny Lind's concert hall, and is now a 
boarding house for queerly gorgeous fish, was 
then a purgatory for immigrants; and having 
gone forth and returned in the steerage, I must 
come through the nation's appointed gate and 
be catalogued. When the man with the official 

223 



ON BROADWAY 

cap asked, "Where were you born?" I made 
answer, "New York," and became aware that 
his attention had been caught; and when in 
reply to "What's your trade?" I said, "Re- 
porter," my further progress was amiably facili- 
tated. A woman gave me a Bible and I bolted 
for Broadway. 

In recollection the street is sharply seg- 
mented. Each feature stands out most vividly 
when it frames a figure — as when I see Herbert 
Spencer staring at Old Trinity. I remember 
that particular day as one on which I met 
Robert Ingersoll near the same spot. The 
"illustrious infidel" halted to tell me that if 
I would come to his office later in the afternoon 
he would give me the interview I wanted. 
Naturally I think it is a great quality to be 
patient with reporters — especially very young 
reporters. Henry Irving, with whom I talked 
in a quiet corner of a club, said that nothing in 
America had appalled him like reporters. Not 
that he didn't like them. On the contrary. 
. . . But somehow (he moved his stick nerv- 
ously) one wasn't quite sure what sort of 
thing one ought to say. A little later I 
saw Irving walking with a portly, flagrantly 
contrasting man near Union Square, swinging 
the stick that had helped emphasize his 
apprehension. 

The platitude is not that one once met 
224 



ON BROADWAY 

everybody below Union Square, but that the 
great meeting places, unlike perhaps those of 
any other famous street, have been so steadily 
and so widely moved. In the matter of Broad- 
way this could only be northward. At the 
period of Prince Edward's ball I suppose it 
was impossible to count on meeting anyone 
very far from the Astor House, and anywhere 
between Wall Street and St. Paul's or City 
Hall Park one still has occasional chances, 
though these chances no longer are likely to 
include that of jostling celebrities on foot. My 
memory ghosts are most numerous in the region 
of the City Hall, the region of literary legend, 
of taverns, and of press rooms. They troop 
back from the time when the man on the top 
of the Center Street shot tower signaled that 
the trap had sprung in the Tombs quadrangle 
and that the extras were now free to celebrate 
another poor devil as duly hung. 

(Two ghosts crowd in where they do not 
belong. They stood side by side, these two 
men, on that raw morning, to be officially 
strangled. Writhing in that cold and horrible 
Tombs yard I saw the traps sprung and a flock 
of pigeons, startled by the noise, rising in a 
shivering flight. A big Irishman beside me 
began to cry. ... It was all part of a reporter's 
job. It went along with bothering Presidents 
and asking brides to describe their gowns.) 

225 



ON BROADWAY 

The northward drift of the bookish and 
theater regions carried its implication as to 
personality, so that while the frames for Edwin 
Booth arm in arm with Lawrence Barrett, 
Tomaso Salvini stalking to a cab, Patti shining 
out of white fur, Robert Louis Stevenson at 
Scribner's or James Russell Lowell hurrying 
out of the old Century office, all belong in or 
near Union Square, later encounters belong to 
a farther north. 

The scene shifts to Madison Square when 1 
recall Mark Twain (in a moist darkness) cuss- 
ing New York's cab service, or O. Henry look- 
ing up at the stars and wondering why cities 
were never supposed to have any. There is, 
too, the picture of "Hop" Smith telling Rud- 
yard Kipling the story of the man who asked 
his new acquaintance, "How do you like Kip- 
ling?" "To tell you the truth," was the an- 
swer, " I never played it." R. K.'s appreciative 
laugh (I think everybody else had heard the 
quip) seemed to be reward enough for the 
quoter. 

Then there was one twilight walk of a mile 
or more with Edmund Clarence Stedman, who 
liked the shop windows, who corrected me as to 
a quotation from his "Toujours Amour," who 
talked of Poe and Whitman, and of what 
Dante might have done with a New York rush 
hour. 1 repeated the story Richard Hard- 

226 



ON BROADWAY 

ing Davis had told me of the youngster who 
wanted to write up the Bowery. Davis, who 
was then editor of Haryer's Weekly, quite 
reasonably suggested that the Bowery had been 
tremendously done. "Yes," cried the young- 
ster, "but it has never been done by me!" — 
which happened to prove, in that case, an irre- 
sistible argument. Stedman agreed, and with 
enthusiasm, that it was the doer and not the 
thing done that made the vast difference, and 
he came back to this when I mentioned a little 
later the fascination of a beautifully right word. 
He had just written somewhere (perhaps in 
The Nature and Elements of Poetry) of "a 
strenuous line," and the word had caught me 
as exquisitely fitting as it fell. "Strenuous 
life" was not yet a battered phrase, but the 
fate of the word was fully prophesied in Sted- 
man's remark about the way words came to 
be bruised, not merely by the attritions of 
ordinary use, but by an intensive jugglery. It 
was as when a pleasant and not unwelcome bit 
of melody was put on the hand organs. I sug- 
gested that being overplayed had reactions a 
good deal like being overpraised. Wasn't it 
true that in either case reactions did not go by 
original deserts or original claims, but by the 
need to chastise the offending reiterators? 
"Criticism is full of that sort of thing ! "juried 
Stedman. 

227 



ON BROADWAY 

Perhaps an occasional impatience toward 
Broadway has an origin of this same sort. A 
self-consciousness comes to be ascribed to the 
street itself. Yet neither the noisy nor the 
tawdry can rob the highway of humanness. 
Its steel and stone frame a state of mind that 
cannot be measured as of width and length. 
Its gamut is fantastically inclusive. Whether 
in the heyday of the Salvation Army or 
in the golden age of the soap-boxers, in the 
mobbing of a prince or a prisoner, in the funny 
curiosity of its crowds, quite impartial between 
a deadly smash-up and some buffoonery of ad- 
vertising, we may see it as pagan and as evan- 
gelical. Any sort of soul can find response 
there. Somewhere it is the kind of street you 
want it to be — unless, indeed, you are a restless 
person, a dreamer of dreams, willing to risk 
classification as a "dangerous radical" by 
looking for an amended nature, by being 
unwilling to have humanity remain precisely 
as it is. 

The native may well wonder (it is part of a 
native weakness so to wonder) what the for- 
eigner gathers from the mere spectacle — not 
what he may chance to say as a guest, but what 
really rankles in his mind. There is a rich 
anthology of the audible. If ghosts of the liv- 
ing and of the dead might whisper in a candor 
transcending all possible repressions, we should, 

228 



ON BROADWAY 

doubtless, be in for a stimulating shock. I 
remember parting with H. G. Wells at mid- 
night (this was in 1906), after an evening at 
a club to which I had lured him, and of seeing 
him recede into the mists of light in the direc- 
tion of the hotel where, earlier in his visit, we 
had discussed The War of the Worlds (for the 
purpose of an article I was writing), and my 
feeling of acute curiosity as to what might be 
kindled in this extraordinary imagination by 
the raw facts of New York. That later com- 
parison with Venice hinted of the picture side; 
deeper connotations were not so easily to be 
marked or traced. To one who could not let 
the future alone, the hulking outlines and the 
kaleidoscopic humanity would spell a very old 
rune and flash prophetically into the dark just 
as they have spelled and flashed for a Whit- 
man, a Maeterlinck, a Lanier, a Dunsany, a 
Kipling, and a Yeats. 

In the midst of one of the most glaring 
scenic ensembles John Burroughs once stopped 
abruptly to review, as he might have reviewed 
the glitter of a seven-ring circus, the stretching 
phantasmagoria of the street. His white head 
was as foreign in effect as if it had been Aris- 
totle's. It belonged in that vineyard on the 
sultry hillside at Esopus where I had seen it 
bobbing among the leaves, and where he had 
laughingly shown me on the packing table the 
16 229 



ON BROADWAY 

antics of a drunken bee who had tarried too 
long among broken and sun-fermented grapes. 
At the moment Broadway seemed particularly 
neurasthenic. The twitching electric constel- 
lations; the tornado of eye tokens; the huge 
vulgarities of appeal, smeared with color and 
sharpened to create new kinds of pricking 
points; the squirming of traffic; the symphonic 
uproar, ceaseless, punctuated with piccolo yelp- 
ings and profound brassy snorts; the amaz- 
ing scurrying figures, sucked or disgorged by 
the raucous recesses of the vista; the evening 
overtones, laden with distant murmurs that 
floated as from the rim of the world — all this 
seemed to be appraised in that half minute of 
pause. Then he turned to me with a queer 
smile. "I suppose," he said, "that in fifty 
years the like of this will seem quiet!" 



CLOTHES AND THE WOMAN 






1 



' 



CLOTHES AND THE WOMAN 

MY innocent remark upon that failure in 
man's sense of humor which induces him 
to think that woman is dressing solely 
for him, has elicited sharp rebuke from Mrs. 
Gilman; a circumstance from which we may 
learn that no aside is safe simply by being 
casual. Mrs. Gilman insists that as it was in 
the beginning it now is; that women are still 
under the spell of an ancient, perhaps even an 
elemental, impulsion; that I am biologically 
wrong in assuming that time has definitely 
modified the instinct of the female to recom- 
mend herself to the male by devices of 
decoration. 

An eminent sociologist might be presumed 
to speak with authority, and when, in a matter 
concerning women, the eminent sociologist 
happens to be a woman and one of the world's 
foremost exponents of the feminine side, no 
man who retorts can avoid a sense of hazard. 
Even a man arrogant enough to feel like the 
entomologist who knew all that it was possible 
to know about ants without being an ant must 

233 



CLOTHES AND THE WOMAN 

still be aware that the odds are against him; 
and I waste no time in denying any such 
arrogance. 

Yet it may be said that the entomologist 
knew some things about ants which the ants 
did not know about themselves. There is no need 
to expand this point. You will suspect me of 
believing that a possible way to know certain 
things about one sex is to belong to the other, 
probably this suggestion need not be di- 
rectly applicable to a question of dress; yet 
it may have a relationship. 

Then there is that complicated question of 
instinct and motive. Few if any of our acts 
or habits have a single causation, and most of 
us are poor witnesses as to our own motives. 
We have an instinct and label it with a motive. 
Over a bunch of these little motive labels we 
paste a large label called a principle. The 
instincts keep right on ignoring the labels 
and letting the labels do the talking. 

It is for this reason that I cannot logically 
or confidently quote the fact that many women 
have assured me that women do not dress to 
please men. Quite aside from the fact that a 
great many women have assured me of things 
that are not so, I must admit this other fact 
about human motives as advising a certain 
caution. And it will be prudent to indicate 
in some appropriate way that I did not acquire 

234 



CLOTHES AND THE WOMAN 

the theory Mrs. Gilman criticizes by any ad- 
missions or protests of women themselves. If 
I were willing to accept such testimony at 
face (or figure) value I might go on thinking 
that Mrs. Gilman had been outvoted. For the 
moment I ignore the testimony, just as women 
persistently ignore the fact that you cannot 
paint the lily. Denial not only does not remove 
suspicion, but often inspires it. I could con- 
cede without a qualm that there are reasons 
why women, speaking to a man, might find it 
comfortable and salutary to deny dressing to 
please men. Looking at the matter calmly, 
or as near calmly as any man may hope to 
look in such a tight place, I can see that denying 
motives of this sort might naturally arise from 
a sense of need to take some of the conceit 
out of men. Even a clever concealment of 
one motive might gather excuse from the 
promptings of another so praiseworthy. 

On the other hand, Mrs. Gilman herself must 
have a motive. I am sure that her motive is 
to establish the truth. If the truth convicted 
men, I am sure, too, that she would not be 
unduly gratified. Since it is possible that I 
also might be accused of having a motive, I 
will concede at once that, in view of the history 
of feminine ornament, some men might feel 
quite sharply hurt by proof that they were 
responsible for the way women dress. Yet, if 

235 



CLOTHES AND THE WOMAN 

it were permissible to argue, it would be only- 
fair to point out that no amount of proof show- 
ing that most men are biased is really proof 
that I am. Though no man could be free from 
suspicion, one might claim to have acquired 
knowledge while simply enjoying what Mr. 
Conrad has called "the privileged detachment 
of a cultivated mind." 

All of Mrs. Gilman's biological deductions 
as to primitive women may be conceded. I 
take the risk of admitting anything as to early 
women and early men, and that devices of 
sex attraction are no more obsolete than sex 
rivalry. But I cannot concede that because 
women began decorating themselves to please 
men they still decorate themselves wholly or 
even generally for that same simple reason. 
It will not do to rally the support of Havelock 
Ellis or any of the other scientists who assure 
us that such primitive impulses have long 
been superseded. Mrs. Gilman has no awe 
for scientists, especially when they chatter 
about women. Nevertheless, I venture to sug- 
gest that there are various signs, plain to every- 
one, that the dress of women, like many another 
institutional function, has strayed far from its 
beginnings. 

It is conceivable that the orthodox Jewish 
woman who dons a harsh wig and tries to look 
old and settled after her marriage, and the 

236 



CLOTHES AND THE WOMAN 

fashionable Christian woman who tries after 
her marriage to look as unsettled and as young 
as possible, are both willing to please men. 
Mrs. Gilman sees a relaxing of dress coquetries 
after marriage. Undoubtedly the same aban- 
donments appear in many men. Courtship is 
a highly competitive game — more competitive 
than it used to be — and artifices of dress are 
as common as artifices of conduct, on both 
sides of the house. But the proportion of 
women who abandon pretty clothes after mar- 
riage for any reason other than because they 
can't get them, or haven't a chance to wear 
them, is surely very small. There must be, 
also, some evidential weight in the fact that the 
most extravagantly decorative clothes are very 
often worn by women who have accomplished 
marriage. These women might have sense 
enough to know that pleasing men, and par- 
ticularly a man, is still good strategy. It will 
be a sad world when the pleasing of one woman 
by one man and the pleasing of one man by 
one woman stops being instinctive or profitable. 
But the signs go quite beyond that. An exces- 
sive splendor so often persists long after domes- 
I tic groaning begins, so long after even bank- 
! ruptcy sets in, that one would often have to 
eliminate the husband at least from the list of 
pleased men. The notorious fact that hus- 
bands — not to consider particularly the stingy 

237 



CLOTHES AND THE WOMAN 

ones — are, as a class, unobservant and unap- 
preciative of partner decoration, might not dis- 
prove the continued need for the coquetry. It 
certainly would not prove that an art fails of 
effect even where its technic is unobserved. 
And it has a tendency to imply that women are 
conscious of the fact that there are other men. 
But it rather hampers proof that women have 
any singleness of need for masculine approval. 

The negligence about dress after marriage 
which Mrs. Gilman regards as so significant 
would look like support for a theory that 
women thought in terms of one man. Think- 
ing in terms of one man, in the matter of 
clothes or of anything else not involving the 
basic union, is about the last thing one would 
care to ascribe to the American woman. It 
ought to be unpleasant to ascribe it to any 
woman. 

However, I must not overlook the fact that 
Mrs. Gilman does not insist that women are 
thinking of men or of a man, in the concrete 
sense. It is, she implies, in a large way that 
the primal impulse foliates, whatever women 
may say or even think. A feeling with regard 
to the opposite sex began it, and that feeling, 
secretly or openly, consciously or unconsciously, 
dominates the expression — that is the conten- 
tion. 

To believe this we should have to overlook 
238 



CLOTHES AND THE WOMAN 

many a related circumstance. The primitive 
woman may have decorated and drudged (she 
was a wonderful bundle carrier, and was per- 
mitted to carry all the bundles) to please a 
man. The civilized parallel is far from perfect, 
and at one of the imperfect points the free or 
freer woman slips through. A great many 
things she once did simply to please a man she 
now does to please or propitiate or rival an 
I environing humanity, or to please herself. I 
am not thinking of the exceptional woman at 
the head of a big corporation, or of any less 
exceptional woman who may be the wage- 
earning head of a family with a useless man 
in it. I am thinking of the average American 
woman, still decorating herself and carrying 
burdens of some human sort. If men began 
by decorating themselves to dazzle women 
and now find a more imperative reason for 
dressing well in the fact that it is good business, 
why may it not be reasonable to give women 
credit for the same shrewdness? 

Nothing is clearer than the primitive reason 
for daily labor, yet who does not see the means 
converted into an end? Who does not know 
men who set out to get money with which to 
live and who long ago lost sense of anything 
but the money? Who has failed to hear men 
who once sought a means to express ideas one 
to another now talking about art for art's sake? 

239 



CLOTHES AND THE WOMAN 

We call these and other changes perversion 
when we don't like them. When we accept 
them we call them evolution. As by the asper- 
sions upon the vermiform appendix, some things 
lose their original meaning altogether. 

The dress of women has lost no expression 
it once had, but it has gained many others. It 
has become a great art — often practiced for its 
own sake. What was once primitively personal 
has become artistically social. In my opinion 
the man, instanced by Mrs. Gilman, who would 
not go forth with his wife without the crinoline 
when crinoline was the fashion, was not in- 
fluenced by male instinct or by thought of 
other men. He was influenced by the thing 
that influences us all more than any other 
thing — social pressure. There is a social expec- 
tation that women will be highly decorated 
and that men will not be highly decorated. It 
doesn't make much difference how that expec- 
tation came about. It is there. I believe that 
for a woman this pressure is felt as exerted 
mostly by other women. If designed merely 
to please men, decoration might be just as 
assertive but it would scarcely need to be so 
fine an art as it now is. The Saturday -night 
emphasis at a summer colony may be occa- 
sioned by men, but men may be an occasion 
without being a cause. They may, for instance, 
be an excuse. 

240 



CLOTHES AND THE WOMAN 

It may please a man to marry him, but it 
would be absurd to say that a woman is neces- 
sarily thinking of nothing else, or is intuition- 
ally prompted by nothing else, when she does 
marry him. There is no need to expound the 
other social or purely personal impulsions that 
might make pleasing him, either as a man or 
as an economic factor, about the last thing in 
her mind. 

After all, I may end where Mrs. Gilman's 
retort began — with that word "solely." I do 
not think my allusion was so poorly safe- 
guarded as she pretends. "Solely for him" 
cannot be made to mean solely as to the ele- 
ments or functions of clothes. It must, I 
think, be taken to mean solely as to women's 
instincts or motives. 

I believe that some women "doll up" almost 
solely to please men. I believe that many 
others have never had any such motive, latent 
or conscious. I believe that most women are 
willing that their decoration should inciden- 
tally please men. It is, I think we might say, 
a matter of percentages. Of course the per- 
centage must be altogether a matter of opinion, 
whether it is estimated by a man or by a 
woman. The debated fling was aimed at the 
complacency that permits some men to think 
that the whole fuss has had men for its special 
and ultimate mark. The notion that modern 

241 



CLOTHES AND THE WOMAN 

women live their lives in any particular and to 
any absorbing extent specifically to please 
men, still seems to me quite fantastic. 

I don't believe women "dress" solely to 
please men, not only because they don't have 
to take that much trouble; not only because 
dress is so satisfying in itself and because, as 
an art, it must always be influenced more by 
its specialist criticism than by intimate or gen- 
eral spectators (and women are the specialists), 
but because so many women have other busi- 
ness in life, and pleasing other women has be- 
come as important to women as pleasing men — 
in a vast number of cases more important. I 
don't believe the special sense of humor which 
women illustrate in their clothes is equally dis- 
tributed among all women. Some women, it 
is quite evident, do not see the clothes pleas- 
antry at all. Every artist is under the hazard 
of a blind spot. The hideousness of a white 
nose or painted lips might be taken as a case 
in point. Yet I am still quite sure men usually 
miss the art implications and the subtle differ- 
ence between pleasing and teasing; still sure 
the cynic may find some excuse for suggesting 
that a great number of women are more inter- 
ested in men as a means of winning clothes than 
in clothes as a means of winning men. 



RESPICE FINEM 



RESPICE FINEM 

MR. MENCKEN has remarked, without 
lament, but in token of a curiosity as to 
a rather interesting circumstance, that 
there is a poor literature of kissing. His own 
contribution is painfully physiological, but the 
subject is physiological and can be disquieting 
under the best of conditions. The one mushy 
book cited by Mr. Mencken might reinforce us 
in being grateful, as he is, that there are not 
more. Probably the lack is not explained by 
refined reserve. Literature has been written by 
all sorts of men and women, a good many of 
whom have had no refined reserve. There must 
be a better explanation. Perhaps this may be 
found in the difficulties of treatise expansion 
as to a subject essentially incidental. Yet 
volumes have been written about more paren- 
thetical subjects. That charming Frenchman 
who made a book about A Journey Round My 
Room proved something that was much more 
difficult to prove. Many a kiss (it is said) has 
lasted longer than a journey round any room; 
and (as Mr. Mencken points out) a kiss may be 
17 245 



RESPICE FINEM 

reiterated, so that while a single kiss has some 
theoretical maximum of duration, kissing may- 
pass from an incident to a preoccupation and 
thus have a truly dimensional importance. 
If a crisis could deserve a chapter a cycle 
could deserve a quarto. 

But more significant, it seems to me, than any 
discursive omissions of literature is the fact, 
now plainly discoverable, that literature has 
lost its chance. No one may now venture to 
waste many words upon the subject of kissing. 
The movies have pre-empted the field. Art 
seeks to light up the obscure. The movies 
leave no obscurities. They illuminate all. The 
mechanics of the kiss have been figured in 
extenso. Its psychology has been diagrammed 
and expounded to the ultimate fraction. Words 
can be no larger than life. The movies spell 
psychology in titanic terms. Abetted by the 
expanding lantern, the camera dissects an emo- 
tion to the thousandth of an inch. No margin 
is left to the imagination or to the sense of 
shame. 

Perhaps it may be discovered that the sug- 
gestive power of the cinema has been grossly 
misstated. The screen does not suggest; it 
tells everything. If kissing has been largely 
the result of curiosity, it may happen that the 
cinema will in time obliterate or at least di- 
minish the status of kissing as an applied art; 

246 



RESPICE FINEM 

for no one sitting in front of the popular screen 
could long retain any curiosities as to the func- 
tion. Even the extension of the act is con- 
veyed indellibly to the mind. It is true that 
censorship limits the picture of the incident (or 
event) to a few seconds, but the irislike con- 
traction of darkness gives contact an infinity. 
I heard a nice old lady say after certain Swiss 
mountain pictures, "I feel as if I had been 
there!" Is it a fantastic conjecture that, 
by the vicarious participations of the screen, 
analysis of the kiss may elicit some correspond- 
ing finality of satisfaction? — that kissing, except 
for the purposes of the camera, will become 
obsolete? 



WHAT THEY WANT 



WHAT THEY WANT 

: 'X TOU know the sort of man I mean," said 
V Brant; "the sort that says, 'I don't 
know anything about art, but I know 
what I like.' If you were getting up an Anthol- 
ogy of Platitude you'd want a few rich sessions 
with him — and his wife. Oh yes! His wife 
would be a wonderful help. She'd furnish you 
with a handsome choice of stuff for a whole 
section of your Book of Bromides. And for 
the appendix — or are they cutting appendixes 
out of books too?" 

"If you're trying to particularize," I said, 
"it seems rather foolish to make your point 
with platitude. Platitudinous persons are the 
most numerous of all, naturally. And a good 
thing that is. Fancy corn or grass or gravita- 
tion taking a notion to be original! The whole 
human game we play on this planet is based in 
platitude — in an expectation that most of the 
human units will keep right on being pretty 
much as they have been; and if they keep on 
being the same they will keep on saying the 



same." 



251 



WHAT THEY WANT 

"Is this editorial cynicism?" demanded 
Brant, "or authorial irony?" 

Brant knows that for years (and years) my 
pen has led a double life; that I have been a 
newspaper editor and that I have been writing 
books. He thinks it is a sign of shrewdness to 
wonder, on any given occasion, from which 
angle comment comes. Sometimes I have to 
remind him that one may be not only an editor 
and a writer, but also a reader — that is, a person. 
Any rights I may have as a person I purpose 
to retain against all the assaults of circum- 
stances. Yet Brant is fair enough in recog- 
nizing the possibility, if not the probability, 
of an angle of emphasis. That each situation 
involves a special outlook (and inlook) is just 
as true as that when my friend indicates north 
his gesture parallels no other on earth. The 
point he indicates is a common concept; the 
angle of indication is unique, individual. 

Exploiting the obvious to him in this way 
had the purpose of making it clear — or at least 
emphatic — that the three positions were each 
tenable ; that as a reader I looked for the writer 
who had written for me; that as a writer of 
books I might (and did) choose deliberately to 
write for those who happened to like the sort 
of thing I like; that as a newspaper editor 
I had to think of All-of-Us. 

"This compulsion," I went on, "has been 
252 



WHAT THEY WANT 

good for me. It has kept me from a bookish 
narrowness to which I think I was predisposed. 
It has never kept me from preferring certain 
kinds of books or certain kinds of persons. 
But it has insisted upon an effort to under- 
stand, in some degree, all kinds of persons. It 
has insisted upon a glance behind that sprawl- 
ing label < The Public."' 

Brant, who enjoys taunting me into being 
oracular, did something corrective to his pipe, 
then mused, "I've always wondered what The 
Public is — or are." 

"One would think, to hear most people 
speak of The Public," I rejoined, "that it was 
a thing — an organic, octopus kind of creature, 
wonderfully unified in its likes and dislikes, 
vastly out there beyond, as if one might go 
forth and confront It, and shout how stupid, 
or how cruel, or how indifferent and perverse 
it is. A man says, 'There was a crowd at the 
entrance when I came,' as if the situation then 
contained this crowd-thing and himself. It 
isn't only a way of speaking. It's a way of 
thinking — a very human way of thinking. 

"One of the results of this way of thinking 
is that when people growl about the public they 
don't feel implicated. They don't feel the part- 
ner responsibility. It does make a big differ- 
ence whether, when we accuse humanity, we 
speak with a membership humility — or chagrin. 

253 



WHAT THEY WANT 

When we think in terms of Me and All-the- 
Rest, and set off All-the-Rest as The Public, 
we can work up a fine fever of peevishness. I 
know men who can accuse humanity in a tone 
of voice that seems to imply that they them- 
selves belong to an exalted and quite different 
species. They can even allude to elemental 
defects like plain selfishness as if the dreadful 
thing had come into existence outside of them- 
selves, as a kind of lamentable freak of nature, 
or perhaps like some subtle epidemic against 
which they are inoculated. They shake their 
heads in a kind of despair, as if really, you 
know, it is a pity these other creatures can't 
see that bad spiritual sanitation makes all the 
trouble, and so on. I fancy it must be com- 
forting, if not actually fattening, to be able to 
hold a position like that." 

"Isn't that pretty much the attitude of the 
average man?" asked Brant. 

"Each of us is the average man in most 
particulars. The point I am getting at is this: 
When a man says, W I don't know anything 
about art, but I know what I like,' he may 
seem to be flinging at art and asserting the 
right of the average not to know anything about 
art, but what he is doing in particular is lazily 
refusing obligation — not only toward art, but 
toward other people. What he likes. That is 
what he sees. Maybe he admits, or even 

254 



WHAT THEY WANT 

claims, that he is just an average man. Maybe 
he doesn't feel that way at all. But he knows 
what he likes. Very good. It is important 
that we should be honest about liking what we 
like. Nothing is more pitiful than the spectacle 
of people making believe to like. Most of us 
learn to pretend so well that we deceive even 
ourselves. I knew a man who pretended for 
thirty years that he liked opera. He loved 
music and felt that opera was its mightiest 
expression. He was logical with himself. He 
thought he had to like it. Then some one told 
him that symphony was the highest form of 
musical expression, and his delight when he 
found that he could have the sublimities with- 
out the fat hero and the grandmotherly chorus 
maidens was a funny thing to see. It would 
be the same, of course, if his pretense had 
happened to be about spats or cheese." 

"Or loving the public," suggests Brant. 

"Yet he might happen to feel the obligation 
to understand the public, even if that is a large 
order. The obligation doesn't worry most of 
us, because most of us don't try it. The obliga- 
tion to understand is pretty heavy luggage for 
the average human traveler. I speak from 
experience. It is easier to sit back and say 
we know what we like. Even being quite 
definite about that is a heavy tax. The artist 
may be definite enough. He needs to lik( 

255 



WHAT THEY WANT 

and dislike — at white heat. He arrogates a 
privilege parallel to that of the man who doesn't 
know anything about art — he often seems to 
feel that it would be dangerous, if not fatal, to 
know anything about the public. Frequently 
he appears to feel that if he tried to understand 
the public he would be less keen about liking 
what he himself liked, and would then be 
unable to reach the white heat. Yet he must 
really wish that the public could understand 
him. If he is contemptuous, as he so fre- 
quently is, when few understand him, he must, 
whatever he may say, be thinking a little about 
being understood. When I am not being the 
editor I have a great deal of sympathy for him. 

"Being understood isn't a class privilege, and 
understanding isn't a class obligation, even if 
the artist might seem to have especial need to 
feel it. But don't let us wander off into that 
art question — though all questions are art ques- 
tions at some point, and it's a bit sad that the 
artist and your average man so frequently seem 
not to see this. What I'm getting at is that 
somebody should feel the obligation to stand 
off and 'get' the average of human wants and 
human wishes." 

"Somebody like the editor." 

"Well, the politician does it first. He has 
always done it first. Not find out what people 
should want, but what they do want. Some 

256 



WHAT THEY WANT 

wants are screamed by a few. Some are whis- 
pered by many. The wants of the silent are 
there, too. A big politician has to guess about 
all of them. I suppose a statesman is a man 
who can guess what people are going to want, 
or are going to think they want. 

"When the editor has made his guess he 
must reach some decision as to what he will do 
in the matter of giving ' them ' what they want. 
He is face to face with a huge problem. 

"It has always been a fashion to make com- 
ment upon even the serious consideration of 
that problem as withering as possible. Want- 
ing is accepted as quite human. Yielding to 
the expression of want, answering wishes, is 
open to caustic suspicion. Often it meets the 
imputation of being the ultimate wickedness. 
When the tradesman says, 'We have no call 
for it,' we are affronted by his explanation. We 
are particularly sensitive when giving them 
what they want happens in the other fellow's 
art or the other fellow's trade. The social 
idealist is shocked when the politician gives 
them what they want. The scientist is shocked 
when the editor gives them what they want. 
The artist is shocked when the merchant (a 
publishing merchant, for example) gives them 
what they want. And we all get together to 
be shocked when the preacher seems to be giv- 
ing them what they want. Even that word 

257 



WHAT THEY WANT 

'them' acquires part of the contempt. You 
know how you feel when the subway guard 
rasps, 'Let 'em off!' You feel the inferiority 
of being a fragment of 'them.' 

"If there is a preacher, or doctor, or lawyer, 
or merchant, or statesman who has been 
chastely uncompromising as between what he 
wants and what 'they' want, let him cast the 
first stone. 

"As a matter of fact, there is an obligation 
that precedes the decision as to giving or not 
giving. I mean the obligation to find out the 
real truth as to what 'they' want. There may 
be a lot of wickedness in the willingness to 
give the public what it wants, but it dwindles 
before the wickedness of accepting, lazily or 
flippantly, a false decision as to what the want 
is. Nobody has ever proved to me that the 
public — that 'folks' in general, the most mul- 
tiplied types of people — really care for vicious 
things. They may like tawdry things, and 
mush — Lord ! how they do like mush ! — but not 
the vicious, the nasty. The evidence is all the 
other way. In the matter of the stage, for 
example, take the plays that have the long 
runs and you have an answer." 

"I'm glad," said Brant, "you don't pretend 
that the long run can be accomplished without 
hokum." 

"I don't pretend that the answer is con- 
258 



WHAT THEY WANT 

elusive or inclusive. I don't contend that there 
is no low taste. There is a vulgarity so pro- 
found that the most resourceful depravity can- 
not fail to give it satisfaction. What I am 
contending is that even the most desperate 
wish to be 'popular' can succeed without giv- 
ing a thought to that depraved minority, and 
that a nasty piece of print or a despicable 
screen show does not, in itself, convict the 
audience. Naturally, the problem would be 
easier if audiences had a better sense of their 
responsibility in rejection. Movies, for exam- 
ple, like newspapers, are elected. We all know 
nice people who are conscienceless voters. 

"The fact is that in the matter of offer and 
acceptance there are always likely to be inade- 
quate deductions. When the really conscien- 
tious are confused, when they talk about * good ' 
things that won't sell enough, I am inclined 
to wonder (particularly when I am thinking 
as the editor) whether they have overlooked 
plain human considerations. A thing that is 
only forty per cent human isn't likely to sell 
as well as a thing that is sixty per cent human. 
The 'good' often overlook the human. I 
mean here not only the uplift good, but the 
artistic good. When we overlook a basic thing 
like human interest we are inviting confusion." 

"By the way," remarked Brant, "what is 
human interest, anyway?" 

259 



WHAT THEY WANT 

"We all have a vote in the answer to that 
question. And of course each of us is one of 
the illustrations. Unless we feel some pressing 
need to guess what human interest is we are 
content to say 'them,' to make sweeping ges- 
tures, sweeping decisions, to lump our assump- 
tions. The first thing the newspaper editor, 
for example, comes to learn is that the public 
is made up of so many kinds. He can't make a 
paper for one kind. Like any other merchant, 
he wants to reach — that is to say, he must 
reach — humanity; so he looks among the kinds 
for the subject interests that are common to 
all. He searches, because he feels obliged to 
search, for the fundamentals of human interest. 
I have agreed with myself upon five of these." 

"Now that" cried Brant, "really interests 
me. I wish you'd be specific as to what they 
are." 

"I have an opinion — by compulsion. I 
couldn't go on without it. I call the first 
fundamental, Sex. No, I don't mean by the 
narrow definition. I could have said Love, 
which also can be pinched to a narrow defini- 
tion. I want the widest term, the big one, 
biologically big, that will cover the whole g 
problem of man and woman, motherhood as 
well as romance, the baby as well as ball 
dresses. If I said that I put this subject first 
because nature did, you would not quarrel 

260 



WHAT THEY WANT 

with me. At all events, it is biologically first. 
The fact that it is abused as a subject, that it 
so frequently obsesses grotesquely, that it is 
made the excuse for the morbid or the merely 
rebellious or the stalely sentimental, cannot 
alter the matter. 

"Second, I put Money. I have found no 
kind of person that is not interested in money 
as a fount of all blessings, as a root of all evil, 
as the implement of greed, as the irritant in 
conflict, as the supreme sophistry of civiliza- 
tion — as any other thing you may wish to call 
it. As worth less than something else, or more 
than something else, as intrusive or elusive or 
z7Zusive — there it is in the foreground, never to 
be ignored — Money. 

"Third, the Body — the shell we live in. 
Sometimes I feel like saying simply, Stomachs. 
Once life was all stomach — a kind of propa- 
gating stomach. It long afterward acquired 
limbs, eyes, and a brain. There are people who 
give the effect of trying to revert — to be again 
simply a vast stomach. Something to eat! 
Magical suggestion ! Something to drink shoul- 
ders in with a colossal swagger as if to belittle 
all other considerations. Any aspirant can 
get more attention for the subject of drink 
than for the subject of education. 

"As for that, something to drink is funda- 
mental. If a man who takes the wrong educa- 
is 261 



WHAT THEY WANT 

tion is badly hurt, so is the man who takes 
the wrong drink. Among wrong things, hurt- 
ing the body is a beginning consideration. 
First importance may not be greatest im- 
portance. A man's soul may be more im- 
portant than his body, but his body is a first 
subject. This may excuse him somewhat for 
thinking so much about it. He doesn't get 
very far in knowing about it. A body story is 
a mystery story. After thousands of years 
of guessing and experimentation it remains 
infinitely enigmatic. The average man doesn't 
know where his liver is. Watch where he puts 
his hand when he says his liver hurts him. As a 
result, anything about the body that can seem to 
be a revelation is likely to elicit attention. 

"I say 'seem.' Maybe we ought to admit 
that to reach human interest, revelation must 
not only be revelation, but must appear to be — 
it must look its interest. But that is an art 
consideration, and we need not go too deeply 
into that. It is good ethics to use the parable 
to hold attention, to appeal to the imagination. 
If the editor of a 'magazine section' could 
make people read about the proper care of 
babies by printing a picture of the heaviest 
year-old baby in the world, he would be in- 
clined to do it. If he prints a picture of a 
Murillo it may get but a glance. If he says 
the picture was found in an attic and sold for 

262 



WHAT THEY WANT 

a quarter of a million, he can seem to hear: 
6 Great Jupiter ! There's an old painting in my 
aunt's attic in Pomfret, Connecticut! Just 
suppose . . . ! ' Thus he gets much more than 
a glance for Murillo, who is (alas !) not a funda- 
mental, by way of the fundamental of money. 
This is shocking, of course. The editor wishes 
all readers were respectful to great art. Yet 
making them see, incidentally, not only Mu- 
rillo, but the fact that great art endures while 
so many other things wither, is a function not 
without its practical side. 

"The editor might be accused of trickery in 
trying to get people to learn things about their 
own bodies, for instance. He would plead 
guilty. He justifies himself for studying ways 
to get people to read. Of course I am speaking 
now of the staple elements of a newspaper 
outside of news. Here the editor's problem is 
not simply to find things readers will like after 
they have read them, but ways to get them to read. 
Attention is an imperative of entertainment as 
well as of education. It is the first imperative 
of salesmanship also. Different ways of at- 
tracting attention are made necessary not so 
much by different kinds of people as by differ- 
ent kinds of situation. A newspaper is a noisy 
"place. . . . 

"But that is a big subject in itself. Let us 
get back to fundamentals of interest. 

263 



WHAT THEY WANT 

"A fourth fundamental may be expressed as 
the Crisis of One. It may be the one in con- 
flict with the many, as in a detective story, or the 
one in conflict with nature, as in a desert-island 
solitude. Anything that isolates the individual 
to the danger point has a universal appeal to 
the imagination. In the presence of a danger, 
every other individual struggles with the victim 
to escape. In the case of a culprit, one sort of 
person wants him to be caught. Another sort 
wants him to get away. Each of us instinc- 
tively puts himself in his place, for a time, at 
least, no matter how wicked he may be, no 
matter whether the moral sense steps in after- 
ward and says, 'He must be caught.' 

"Notice here that the reader is always like 
the politician. He says (or feels) intuitively, 
'Where do I come in?' Human interest goes 
by the privilege of inhabiting the situation pre- 
sented. We intuitively say: 'What would / 
do with a million?' 'What would J have done 
in the open boat if . . . ? ' and so on. As for his- 
tory, it repeats again and again the drama of 
The-One-in-Conflict-with-the-Many. Some- 
times the one is a culprit. Sometimes he is a 
genius. And each of us is a little world. To 
be Myself. And to be a Member. The eternal 
conflict is wrapped up in that. 

"There are stories that might be cited to 
indicate how frequently all the fundamentals 

264 



WHAT THEY WANT 

may be voiced in one drama, and that suggest, 
too, how some forces that may be strong as 
personal feelings may have little fascination as 
something to watch. Jealousy, to take one 
instance, can be much mightier as an emotion 
than as a dramatic objective. A story like 
The Count of Monte Cristo touches the funda- 
mentals in a way that is sure of popular appeal. 
The four fundamentals I have mentioned are 
all here — love, dazzling treasure, the bodily 
ordeal, and a terrific conflict in isolation. 

"The individual looks eagerly or reluctantly, 
but inevitably, into the fifth fundamental — 
the Hereafter — the Great Outside. A sense of 
this fundamental is in the back of every mind, 
whether the mind knows it or not. The mind 
may think it has turned away from religion — 
it may, in fact, seem to have no religious sense 
at all. But touched in the right way by a ques- 
tion as to what comes After, every mind must 
hear the knocking. An elemental awe awaits 
the supreme suggestion. The most violent 
outcry of repudiation never can conceal this 
supreme curiosity. Indifference toward art 
may be honest. The social sense may be unde- 
veloped or blunted. Indifference about the 
hereafter, about all that lies outside of our 
senses, beyond the horizon of earthly traffic, 
is unthinkable. Anything that may look like 
indifference is a pretense. Every sane man and 

265 



WHAT THEY WANT 

woman on earth would give attention to the 
first absolutely authenticated ghost. It would 
be hard to think of a kind of man or woman 
who wouldn't be interested to hear of a single 
substantiated sign that what we call the soul 
has a continuity. 

"We reach in this what may be a high senti- 
ment. Sentiment is as elemental as hunger — 
it is a hunger. The greatest salesman I ever 
knew told me that in any situation his first 
consideration was sentiment. Some people 
try to make a world without it. It can't be 
done. It's easy to overlook it. I know poets 
who seem to have no sentiment at all. And I 
know business men who are saturated with it. 
You never can tell where or how you may find 
it. Of course, sentimentalism is sentiment 
without humor. We can't ignore real senti- 
ment. Carry a little of it with you when 
you go out to find what 'they' really want. 
It will help you to be patient if you are annoyed 
to discover how the 'great average' holds fast 
to primary things. 

"We may discover that some very important 
things are not quite primary. To reach atten- 
tion for these it may be necessary to relate 
them to primary things. And we should give a 
thought to how it might be if the really 'popu- 
lar' tendency were the other way about. The 
cynic has his laugh about the Mother songs, 

£66 



WHAT THEY WANT 

for example. * Hokum/ says the theatrical man. 
Try to fancy a world in which the average 
person did not in some degree respond to the 
mother sentiment. It isn't the mother senti- 
ment that is mawkish; it is the make-believe, 
the sop thrown to that sentiment, that excites 
ridicule. It is the mountebank, pretending to 
reflect popular emotions, and shamelessly pa- 
rading his hokum counterfeit, who so often 
makes 'what they want' seem absurd, if not 
vicious." 

"But doesn't what they want get on your 
nerves?" demanded Brant. "Doesn't a sense 
of the willingness to accept mush, if not to 
ask for it, tire you after a while? Don't you 
get furious about their liking the same sort of 
thing?" 

"Who doesn't? But I'm obliged to admit 
that liking the fundamentals isn't liking the 
same sort of thing. Everybody likes some sort 
of newness, even when set against newness 
as an abstraction. Successful newness is a 
way of reaching the fundamental. That is 
where the artist comes in." 

"Good Heavens! You don't call it art, do 
you — ? Excuse me, old man. I don't mean — " 

"Of course you don't. And you're confusing 
(quite in the cognoscenti manner) art and its 
possible functions. If art in itself has no ethics, 
neither has it any discriminations, and for the 

267 



WHAT THEY WANT 

same reason. It is not a priest and it is not an 
aristocrat. The artist may have the spirit of 
either of these, and he may not. Art is a wand 
or a weapon. It shines impartially in a sacristy 
or in a slum. The art of a speech from a cart 
tail is different from the art of a speech in a 
parlor. Whether it is a higher or lower art 
depends not on the place or the subject or the 
audience, but upon the artist. Whether it is 
swaying a mob or a Senate, it is art. To use 
art to sway or to answer a large audience will 
always seem an inferior trick to the man who 
measures art by the number of people who 
can't understand it, whereas the real measure 
is expressed, and always must be expressed, by 
the size of the artist. Many great artists have 
been indifferent to audience or to response. 
But this does not establish indifference to audi- 
ence or response as a true measure. On the 
other hand, many great artists have been 
exquisitely sensitive to response, and this does 
not dignify the other practice of forgetting 
everything but the audience. 

"One who has been translating in the great 
amphitheater is privileged also to sit in his 
own library with the cronies who are willing to 
listen to him in the original. Though he may 
be more personal before the small audience, 
this need not mean, despite the usual assump- 
tion, that he will be more honest. The big 

268 



WHAT THEY WANT 

audience calls out the best of some men, the 
worst of some others. A man who is instinc- 
tively dishonest will be dishonest where he has 
the most encouragement. There have been 
plenty of famous uplifters who personally pre- 
ferred beer and smutty stories. On the other 
hand, I have known men who were artificial 
and inferior in a crony company who in the 
amphitheater not only blazed splendidly, but 
plainly reached their fullest and finest personal 
expression. Naturally, then, a writer's indi- 
vidual feeling about audience, however con- 
scious or automatic the influence may be, is a 
determining factor, in any given case, as to 
the coloring of his output. The men we call 
artists' artists are certain not to be big-audience 
men, even if the degree of art may be as definite 
in one case as in the other. Confusion of kinds 
of art and degrees of art has led to endless 
wrangling. 

"Every artist has before him a trilogy of 
considerations — himself, the audience, and the 
art. He may be benevolent or selfish in con- 
sidering only himself. He may be benevolent 
or selfish in considering only the audience. 
When he considers only the art he is like a 
miser with his money, a theologian who sees 
only the altar cloths, or a fanatical Efficiency 
Man with his Schedule — he has forgotten what 
it is all about. Art ought to mean, to the artist 

269 



WHAT THEY WANT 

working as an individual, the expression of him- 
self to others. He may accomplish this expres- 
sion by forgetting himself for the moment, or 
by forgetting others for the moment. When 
his skill comes he may be able to accomplish 
it by forgetting art for the moment. No mat- 
ter which he is able or willing or desirous of 
forgetting in his work, he cannot think of the 
objective product as potential without thinking 
of it as something to be seen or heard or read. 
There is no other reason for making it objec- 
tive. There is no reason why a poet should 
write poetry save to communicate himself. 
The poet's feeling may be more important than 
his thought. His thought may be more impor- 
tant than the particular expedients of expres- 
sion. Yet the expression is a prime necessity 
in communication, and since we have agreed 
to call a poet a person who not only holds, but 
who brings beauty, a poet who really despises 
audiences is unthinkable. 

"Naturally, the choice of the large audience 
is more often influenced by pressure than by 
impulse. Small-audience people are racking 
their hearts to face the large audiences, some- 
times, it may be, because they want the large- 
audience thrill, but mostly because they need 
the large-audience rewards. There are those 
who are naturally large-audience people who 
aspire to the small-audience honors. These 

270 



WHAT THEY WANT 

sometimes present a pitiful spectacle, but we 
can't decently rebuke the aspiration when it 
is real. To those who may recklessly aspire to 
a double life—" 

" I see ! " said Brant — " who would live by the 
large audience and get their joy from the small 
one." 

"Perhaps that way — precisely as with other 
j people in the world. Yet it can be the other 
way about. And there can be the lucky ones 
who get a joy from both. After all, Brant, the 
people in the audiences are all folks. The 
trouble with the large audience isn't its size, 
the strong infusion of difficult elements, or the 
drunken sort of thrill some people get from 
it—" 

"Of course not!" exclaimed Brant. "It's 
just the everlasting need for the hokum." 

"And to add to the confusion there can be an 
artistry in hokum. All the same, how do we 
know that there shall not arise some day a 
great artist, a greater than any we have known, 
who will love the audience of All-of-Us and who 
shall put over on that audience a really great 
art — as great as the artistry in the sky or 
in a Niagara — without the progressive stages, 
without having to be dead a thousand years, 
without having to be studied or indicated 
or suppressed or in any way martyred to get 
through." 

271 



WHAT THEY WANT 

"The great audience of All-of-Us will have 
changed a great deal before that can happen," 
growled Brant. Then he swung about to ask; 
"You're not satisfied with The Public, are 
you?"^ 

"Being satisfied with the public would be 
equivalent to being satisfied with humanity. 
I share the common c 1 satisfaction with hu- 
manity. But I'm mc c dissatisfied with it 
when it isn't human. Ihe situation is quite as 
distressing as that described by those who 
lament that living with Americans doesn't 
sufficiently Americanize. Haven't you noticed 
how many people live with humanity without 
being humanized? It's quite amazing. 

"My five fundamentals simply assume that 
most of humanity is likely to continue to be 
human for quite a while. Ignoring humanness is 
a lonesome job. Trying to change humanness is 
a prodigious bore. Putting heart's blood into 
something and grieving because humanness 
doesn't seem to like it — well, you know the 
depth of that tragedy." 

Both Brant and I were silent for a little 
space. 

Presently Brant said: "Of course, you're an 
individualist whistling in a public darkness to 
keep up your courage. I once heard of a 
prostitute who wrote a beautiful prose-poem 
on chastity." 

272 



WHAT THEY WANT 

"Why not?" I retorted. "Perhaps only a 
prostitute would be equipped to appraise 
chastity. Perhaps only the artist who had 
bruised his soul trying to please the arena 
could truly know what was in himself, what he 
really wanted to say, and to whom, among 
the many, he really wanted to say it. If the 
arena made him bigge 7 * he would create bigger 
things. If the arena dlled the flower of his 
faith in himself — " 

"Go on," demanded Brant. 

" — then he would know, when it was too 
late, that while the arena might have been good 
for him as a man, he never should have gone 
there with his art. But mark you: he would 
be a fool to believe that the arena does this 
sort of thing to the artist alone. You and I 
may think it grievous that the artist should be 
hurt, but it would be a pity to overlook the 
grievousness of anybody's hurt. The supreme 
art, the art to which all other arts are sub- 
sidiary — in fact, all the others actually find 
their strength in it — is the art of living. When 
the artist in living is battered by the crowd 
he too may crawl to his lonesome closet with 
astonishment or anger or despair in his heart." 

Brant's resentment leaped like a flame. 
"After facing the need to give them what they 
want — after his ordeal with 'human interest'?" 

"Yes. After facing the humanity that is. 
273 



WHAT THEY WANT 

Fortunately he doesn't always mope, or fail to 
'come back.' There is a factor, in singing or 
in selling, that is larger than trade or technic. 
It is personal power — call it charm, if you like, 
or magnetism. Either as artist or as citizen 
we have good reason to watch for that. We 
may weep that there should be so little of it 
about, or grin at the notion that it can be 
bought in a correspondence course, but we must 
see that personal power can't exist in a con- 
temptuous aloofness. To hate the world is to 
have been defeated by it, and personal power 
doesn't take the count. So far as writers are 
concerned, you and I know that when insight, 
sympathy, and enthusiasm are fused in the 
forceful word the world generally listens — even 
in noisy places like a newspaper. When we are 
interested in life, life seems to find it out. 
Human interest awakens most quickly to 
human interest." 

"I see," said Brant. "The way to beat life 
is to like it. Suggests lifting yourself by your 
bootstraps." 

"We all do like life somewhat, even while we 
are gnashing our teeth. We are not all rap- 
turous, or even cordial, about it. Some of us 
prefer to be openly insulting to it. But if life 
didn't like itself there wouldn't be any life. 
The rage of the rejected lover centers in the 
fact that he wants the girl. Our fury about 

274 



WHAT THEY WANT 

humanity centers in the fact that we want 
humanity. Inevitably. We are born that way. 
And we each want humanity to love us for our- 
self alone. Generally it doesn't. It's a bitter 
courtship." 

"Sophist!" snorted Brant. 



ARTIST AND AUDIENCE 



ARTIST AND AUDIENCE 

ON a later occasion Brant came back to 
that subject of the audience. 

"And I wish," he said, "that you 
would forget, if you can, the editor side of your- 
self. An editor is just naturally a compromiser." 

"Yet you're asking me to compromise now — 
asking me to forget something. Isn't it a worse 
compromise to forget something — in this case, 
the All-of-Us — than to look honestly at the 
plain foreground obstacles that must be skirted 
on the road to an ideal? Perhaps the best 
compromise is like that — an enforced detour to 
a destination." 

"Staring at foreground obstacles is precisely 
the way to miss ideals," declared Brant. 
"There is too much of that. How many peo- 
ple are thinking of anything else but foreground 
obstacles? Isn't the muddle of the world a 
situation created by foreground puttering in a 
stupid blindness as to horizons? Where would 
Art have been if it had moped over the en- 
croaching clutter of obstacles? Art has noth- 
ing to do with obstacles. It has never done 

279 



ARTIST AND AUDIENCE 

anything great except by ignoring them alto- 
gether. It thinks straight through them. It 
dissolves obstacles." 

"Not obstacle-people," I protested. "I wish 
it could be more potent in changing people." 

"It has changed them mightily — but not by 
trying to do that. It has changed them by 
being true to itself — simply by being true. 
That is its one obligation, to be true." 

"True to life?" 

"True to truth; the truth dreamed by the 
artist. The artist who thinks of anything 
beyond that is not being true. If he thinks of 
effects, if he has preachy purposes, he is done 
for. Absolutely." 

"We sha'n't quarrel about devotion to truth. 
But we can't communicate truth without hav- 
ing intentions. An accidental splash of color 
might look like art, but it would not be art 
unless it was intended. When art accepts 
accident, as it so often does, it adds the inten- 
tion by its acceptance. A temple without 
intention would be meaningless foolery. There 
would be no real architecture in a house that 
couldn't be lived in. Art must have its idea, if 
only the idea that blue is rather a wonderful 
color. Art is quite privileged to be beautifully 
nonsensical, because we can inhabit beautiful 
nonsense with great joy. Apparently there is 
a lot of beautiful nonsense in nature. It is a 

280 



ARTIST AND AUDIENCE 

great puzzle to humorless people, to fanatics 
and prigs. 

"If Art must have its idea or its emotion, it 
is bound to have its audience-consciousness 
because it is bound to choose terms to reach 
any audience. The sculptor wants to know, 
before he begins, from which point his statue 
is to be seen. The Sistine Chapel had its spec- 
tator considerations. To a singer the size of 
the hall will affect the technic. The speaker 
who prepares himself likes to know whether he 
is to talk from the tail of a cart or from the 
corner of a drawing-room. The writer may 
ignore the audience consideration, but kind of 
reader and "place of reader are factors just the 
same. It is not true that the writer is the only 
artist who can ignore the mechanics of contact. 
The fact that he may do so simply proves that 
his audience so often has to find him, search 
him out. He survives among those who do 
find him. If his chosen audience is slow in 
finding him, or doesn't find him at all, he isn't 
proved to have been wrong." 

"Then what good does it do him to think of 
an audience?" 

"Choosing an audience, even in the case of 
choosing a medium of publication, will be dis- 
appointing in proportion to the chooser's ex- 
pectations. I should say that too definite an 
expectation would be a ball and chain. I've 

281 



ARTIST AND AUDIENCE 

implied, I think, that any expectation, any 
working consciousness, would be fatal to some 
artists. My only insistence is that if a phi- 
losophy is implicit in all writing an audience of 
some sort is implicit in all writing, just as the 
retina is implicit in the idea of color. The 
meaning of a word is determined not by its 
ancestry or previous condition of servitude, 
but by the reaction it sets up. That con- 
sideration directly affects the choice of the 
word. The beauty of a color is not in the 
chemical elements, but in the effect. A beauti- 
ful word is a word that carries a beautiful sug- 
gestion." 

"I don't object," said Brant, "to the image 
of a kind of reader in the writer's mind. Maybe 
that may keep him going. If it kindled the 
artist in him, all right. If it made him want to 
put over something that didn't belong to his 
art, all wrong. If it perverted him into a 
propagandist he would cease being an artist." 

"In my opinion, Brant, every critic who 
takes that view relates the degree of art to the 
degree of irresponsibleness, as if the kind of 
idea not only affected the kind of art, but the 
degree of art. Of course a very beautiful art 
may and often has been used to carry a damn- 
foolish idea, and a tremendous idea may be 
put forward with very clumsy and inadequate 
art. The sooner we realize that art, like any 

282 



ARTIST AND AUDIENCE 

other instrument, may be used by angel or 
devil or plain fool, the sooner we will learn to 
disentangle the superficially aesthetic and com- 
municatory forcefulness from beauty or force 
of idea. The word Art itself is quite inade- 
quate. It is used loosely to describe a thing 
that is made up of style (the voice of the artist), 
technic, subject, intention. When writers and 
critics occasionally give the effect of chasing 
themselves in circles, forgetting what it is all 
about, we have some reason to blame that 
absurd word Art, which, taken closely, means 
only the expression, but which is constantly 
employed to mark the personality of the artist, 
his subject, his intentions, and his recognitions 
as to the audience. The frequent implication 
is that art is a kind of expression of which the 
critic approves, addressed to the sort of people 
which the critic regards as fit to be addressed. 
If it is addressed to any other sort, though by 
the same man and with the same beauty of 
medium, it is not art. Thus, if you believe in 
the ideas, the thing is art. If you don't believe 
in the ideas the thing is propaganda. The fact 
that open tracts have passed into literature 
seems to carry no hint. The propaganda of 
to-day may be the literature of to-morrow. 
Also it may not. The point is that the propa- 
ganda element — the element of the thing said, 
the recognizing-an-audience element — does not 

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ARTIST AND AUDIENCE 

affect the degree of art at all. Dante, Goethe, 
Voltaire, Rousseau, Milton, Swift, Dickens, 
Ibsen, Whitman, all wrote a lot of propaganda, 
a fact noted with violent resentment in their 
own time, and the art verdict of to-day forgets 
the propaganda if great art is there, just as the 
world has been willing to forget the art if power- 
ful propaganda was there. The artist's in- 
fluence fixes the recognition, that is to say, the 
effect on the audience — the audience of his time 
or the final audience." 

"But, my dear boy, there is a big difference 
between using an art and being an artist. And 
there is a big difference between the situation 
of an artist using propaganda and that of an 
artist sticking to art." 

"A great difference. Sometimes the aesthet- 
ics of ethics and the ethics of aesthetics look to 
be a long way apart. The most important fact 
is the protagonist. The thing he wants to do 
must be accepted from him. If he does it 
with real beauty it is art. If he thinks about 
the beauty rather than about the thing he is 
doing, if he builds a carriage in which nothing 
rides, we are likely to catch him at it. If he 
feels like being nonsensical he has only to be 
spontaneously and beautifully so to win the 
gratitude of all who are bored by the droning 
of an argumentative world. If he can please 
himself by pleasing the 'precious/ he talks 

284 



ARTIST AND AUDIENCE 

about nuances. If he wants to please the liter- 
ary shop crowd he will wear new words and 
find new ways of insulting the equator. And 
so on. Art addressed to other artists is, natu- 
rally, most likely to be audience-conscious. 
Too often criticism is acutely audience-con- 
scious. And it has a very good excuse, because 
it is talking about art consciousness and art 
effects. The critic searches in books, as Mr. 
Wells searched in American life, for ' sl common 
ordered intention,' and the outside reader, 
without special gifts of analysis, often finds, as 
Mr. Wells found in Boston, 'a terrifying 
unanimity of aesthetic discriminations.' 

"We have no quarrel as to the fact that art 
may be used to express a wholly detached emo- 
tion of beauty. It may be used to be wholly 
personal, and it may be used to be wholly 
impersonal. It may be used to preach a Ser- 
mon on the Mount or a Gettysburg Address, 
or it may be used to express, in terms of as- 
tounding loveliness, a maniacal contempt for 
God and man. When Emerson said that there 
was no object so foul that intense light would 
not make it beautiful, he was expressing the 
power of art to be beautiful in itself. The white 
light of art may make a foul man or a foul 
subject beautiful. But since art may attempt 
to get along without conscious purpose, yet 
can't get along without subject, the foulness is 

285 



ARTIST AND AUDIENCE 

bound to become an issue when the art acquires 
an audience, because if it is good art the audi- 
ence will see straight through to the subject, if 
not straight through to the artist." 

"Are you pretending to believe in self- 
consciousness?" 

"On the contrary, I'm seeking to pillory a 
pretense, chiefly, of course, because I believe 
an artist is helped as much as other men are 
helped by being honest; because I believe that 
every gesture contemptuous toward reactions 
is a wasted gesture. Great art is never peevish. 
It may be revolutionary, but it never is merely 
rebellious. It may heave up like a mountain 
and smash things, but it doesn't make faces at 
the landscape. Constantly thinking about art 
more definitely involves self -consciousness than 
constantly thinking about the audience. No 
real passion for art could be felt by a man 
whose passions had been fed by art alone. 
Bob Ingersoll said about a real dollar that it 
doesn't have to be redeemed, because it is the 
redeemer. The thing the artist expresses is 
not art, it is life — life in the artist or in the 
universe outside of the artist. 

"The artist, 'sitting on the curbstone of the 
world,' hears something in himself, sees some- 
thing beyond. He says, 'I will say it!' It 
would be a mere drunkenness to say it in the 
dark to no one at all. He is not less an artist — 

286 



ARTIST AND AUDIENCE 

he is completely the artist — when he finds some 
one to say it to. It might give him a whimsical 
joy to say it to a lunkhead who wouldn't know 
what he was talking about. To wish to say it 
to some one who will know what he is talking 
about cannot belittle him. The truth is, of 
course, that he could have no terms even for 
whimsicality save by practice in assuming a 
recipient. Passions imply response. 
"You see, Brant, I'm summing up — " 
"I think you're slipping out from under," 
growled Brant. 

"I'm summing up. If passion implies re- 
sponse; if communication implies audience; if 
inference sometimes surpasses implication — if 
the audience sometimes carries away from a 
work of art more than the artist carried to it, 
giving him credit, as it should, for the sum of 
the reactions — then who shall deny to the 
artist the right of direct address? There may 
be a kind of thing he can do only in a state of 
trance, but why insist that he shall do all of 
his work that way? Ever watch a man or 
woman — even one intuitionally quiet — light up 
in a conversation? Ever watch them become 
incandescent? The illumination may be beau- 
tiful or it may be disastrous, but it was evoked 
by response — by contact. The greatest written 
art, in my opinion, will always be wrought by 
those who have so fully contacted life as to feel 

287 



ARTIST AND AUDIENCE 

the audience without being conscious of it; 
who realize that it is more deeply indispensable 
to make the audience forget the expedient 
than to forget it themselves; who, as between 
the necessary solitude and the necessary con- 
tact by which vision is fed, will, as Emerson 
had it, keep ' the head in one, the hands in the 
other.' I have no more belief in an autocracy 
of expression than in an autocracy of govern- 
ment. For the same reason that I dislike 
government for its own sake or church for its 
own sake, I dislike a notion of art that puts it 
aside from life, that by releasing it from a 
participating responsibility fortifies the brutal 
indifference of the stupid, the shut-minded, 
and the whole brood of social quacks. The 
prodigious sophistry that great art gets through 
has done a lot of harm. One might as well say 
that all great deeds get through. Most of the 
greatest deeds must, in the nature of things, 
never be heard of. To say that a work of art 
lives is to say that it came to recognition and 
that it continues to be recognized. If it lives 
by response surely it may be born in par- 
ticipation." 

"Evidently," said Brant, with a sad grimace, 
"you're dismissing the poor chaps who've 
tried 'addressing' the world and couldn't get 
a blink of response. Can you imagine a kind 
of artist who wouldn't paint or write for a 

288 



ARTIST AND AUDIENCE 

whole world if he didn't hear, 'We have no 
call for it'?" 

"I can imagine an artist who is able to forget 
what the world needs. But at the moment I'm 
not thinking so much of him as of those creeds 
implying that artists are released from the 
obligation to remember. And I am taking 
into account the fact that all men suffer in the 
same degree from the inertia or indifference of 
masses. The artist's lonesome devotion is not 
unique, and neither is his suffering. He cannot 
cheer nor lead nor creatively beautify life, nor 
even, in the closest sense, creatively express 
himself while he thinks of himself in terms 
either of an exasperated martyrdom or of a 
peculiarly privileged aloofness. I can think of 
him as withdrawn to find himself; as piercingly 
alone on the mountain, to see and to feel; I 
may choose to think of him as a kind of god. 
But much patience goes with being a god. One 
can fancy an angry god, but not an exasperated 
one; above all, not a contemptuous one. My 
literary gods, carrying human chains, often 
blaze with tempers. Yet the thing that shines 
at the last, through every obscuration, is a 
fundamental sympathy for that poor devil, 
Man, who so seldom knows what he wants, 
who never knows what he needs, whose appe- 
tites so often ignore his hungers, who shuffles 
off at the end without having suspected that 

289 



ARTIST AND AUDIENCE 

his deepest hunger was for beauty, and that 
ministers of beauty awaited only his word." 

"I suppose," said Brant, looking into his 
disgraceful pipe, "that all optimism must have 
its working medium of sophistry; and every 
man who doesn't commit suicide must be some 
sort of an optimist. But I don't see the artist 
as you do. I see him safe only when I see him 
aloof. I see him sure only when he can forget 
the clamor of the crowd. If I think of him as 
a god I am the more certain that he will not 
consent to be told what he shall do, knowing, 
as he must, that what he does do will be best 
for the rest of them, and best for the rest of 
them only when he creates out of god-stuff, not 
by the 'call' that comes at sales counters, but 
by the call within him." 

"Brant," I said, "we are becoming rhapsodi- 
cal in our divergences. We disagree because 
we are talking about art, which is itself opinion 
in solution. Perhaps we may be consoled by 
history. The artist of the pen once had to 
make his peace with a prince — " 

"As between a patron and a public," cried 
Brant, "I believe art fared better with the 
ancient angel." 

"There was much to be said for the concen- 
trated truckling. Yet we may overestimate its 
consolations. How the artist must have hated 
the creature to whom he wrote that gorgeously 

290 



ARTIST AND AUDIENCE 

subservient dedication! There are more read- 
ers now — " 

"Such as they are — " 

" — and why shouldn't the better democracy 
cheer us a bit? Why isn't there a splendor in 
the greater challenge? A larger proportion of 
people are influenced by art than ever before 
were influenced by it. Few people understand 
art, as such, but asking that they should is a 
good deal of a presumption. So long as life 
remains a mystery art may well be cryptic to 
the general. What we call indifference to art 
is often simply a taking for granted. A taking 
for granted hurts, and if it is a tribute it is an 
acrid tribute, but it may be that it is what art 
had to reach in preparation for its biggest 
work. We now take the Grand Canon for 
granted. Only a multiplied and highly supple- 
mented Grand Canon in Mars or somewhere 
else could astonish us. Art's biggest work may 
be done when it drops its capital and not only 
chucks all brahminical bombast but every ves- 
tige of sectarian pretense. I don't know. Just 
now it seems to need the robes of its religion to 
keep warm. For any purpose of prophecy we 
are disqualified by closeness and by pressure of 
the day's work of art itself. In our order of 
living, groups of men are glib in wishing that 
all creeds might be blended save their own. 
Yet meanwhile, though art may be ignored, it 

291 



ARTIST AND AUDIENCE 

can't ignore. For better or worse its treasure 
is in the keeping of humanity; its life is a 
giving." ^ 

Brant interposed, soberly: "I see your artist 
as patiently eager — and meek — wincing in an 
east wind. I must confess to you that he's not 
an inspiring figure." 

"The great participating figures have not 
escaped the mire. There was a day when I 
saw the artist as a kind of Christ . . . invisible 
to most eyes, striding in the muck of the world. 
Yes, I saw the nails, too. ... At other times the 
figure (by the persistent foolishness of personi- 
fication) has been that of a bacchante. There 
are a good many reasons why we should regard 
the figure as feminine, though this would offend 
the inventors of virility. Until some woman 
looms beside a Buonarroti or a Rodin, beside a 
Dante or a Shakespeare, her figure will prob- 
ably seem inconclusive. The fripperies of the 
symbolism do not matter. Life matters a great 
deal. We shall quarrel about the way it is to 
be done, but art must somehow serve life." 

"As truth does," said Brant. 

Yet we sat surrounded by symbols; and in 
my eyrie the mere noises of life, fumes of sound, 
rising . . . rising and drifting . . • were all of 
which we could be agreed. 



MIXING 



MIXING 

THE anchorite is, perhaps, not wholly 
obsolete. It may be that he survives 
differently. We might doubt whether a 
Simeon Stylites could long maintain any effect 
of being aloof in a modern world. Invention 
has favored curiosity, and withdrawal begins 
to imply a sturdier resolution and more of 
ingenuity than it once implied. Moreover, a 
newer ethics stresses urgently, and sometimes 
insultingly, the special virtue of mingling. 
Large rewards are promised to the good 
"mixer." 

The phrase "glad-hand artist" may be 
intended to mark an emphasis of technic on 
the part of the practitioner, yet it does not 
specifically accuse the rituals of civility nor 
put any slur on the general righteousness of 
mixing. Few excesses can be so irritating as 
an excess of cordiality, and few expressions 
are under so imperative a need to conceal their 
art as that art which undertakes to reconcile 
human contacts. Envy, too, will play its part. 
It will be quick to catch the exaggeration; it 

295 



MIXING 

will be suspicious of motive, and above all 
alertly critical of ineptness and intrusion. 
There is always room for the pusher. All 
decency rises in resentment of the wrong way 
and the wrong time, and of the bounder insen- 
sibility that spoils so many moments. But 
the basic morality of mixing is maintained 
with an American insistence. It is made clear 
beyond debate that mixing pays. 

Systems of etiquette, plausible and port- 
able, are profusely sold in recognition of a 
need for facility in formulas of introduction 
and greeting. Memory systems thrive on an 
eloquently described terror resulting from for- 
getting names. To be able to say, with a 
spontaneous readiness, because you have filled 
your head with an alarm-clock machinery of 
identification, "Mr. Watson, meet my friend 
Mr. Pinkley of Peoria," is held up as an ideal 
indispensable to every young man who wishes 
to get on. There is so much to be said for the 
ability to recall that Mr. Watson is Mr. Wat- 
son, as well as for the supplementary miracle 
of being sure that your friend from Peoria is 
Pinkley, that the device assuring so happy a 
consummation has much to justify its sheer 
weight. Remembering faces and qualities is 
no substitute. One can't introduce by a face. 
The name is necessary, and if it is necessary 
even a cumbersome implement for seizing it 

296 



MIXING 

may have more than a debatable utility. 
Politics and business both imply the name gift. 
"He met me once in Minneapolis eighteen 
years ago," we are told of a politician, "and 
here to-day he was out with, ' How are you, Mr. 
Marsh?', on the instant." Equally marvelous 
agilities are related of the geniuses of business. 
Whether it is by virtue of a gift or a purchase, 
a name-gathering facility is proved to be 
profitable. We may stand appalled before the 
requirements. We may be able to fancy the 
machinery or the effort, and conclude that if 
we could remember all the names we couldn't 
remember anything else, but the immense 
convenience of the names stands forth as 
indisputably comfortable. 

Aside from any such matters of detail, 
reasonable mixing can scarcely be questioned 
as a civilized habit. Many a recluse has 
extolled the practice. It would be late in the 
day to urge mingling as a means of under- 
standing, a means not to be matched for its 
peculiar enlightenments by any substitute 
process. But when this that is obvious is 
accompanied by the implication that personal 
mingling is the only means of understanding, 
when we see an ideal of individual develop- 
ment predicated wholly on such mixing, when 
we encounter a glad-hand culture complacent 
in its surface wisdom and its cheerful willing- 

297 



MIXING 

ness not to know anything but vocalized life, 
this term mixer may well give us a turn. 

We may be reminded, for example, that it 
is possible to meet more minds than can come 
with a touch of the hand, and that physical 
association, in the present ordering of life, 
is but a minority influence in the possible 
development of character. Those who "mix" 
most widely and effectively are those who 
also read. 

Naturally the "practical" specialist in mix- 
ing forgets books. On sudden challenge he 
would indicate the reader as representing 
quite the opposite sort of thing. "His head in 
a book" — thus the father or mother who wants 
the boy to get out and meet people. That the 
book could represent a veritable meeting would 
be in many circumstances a notion of astound- 
ing novelty. As in meetings with people, 
meetings in books have their grades of sig- 
nificance, but the influential reality of the 
contact is a truth that needs, perhaps, only 
some convincing emphasis to lift a little of the 
opprobrium from reading. The parent wise 
enough to wish that a youngster might meet 
decent persons would be likely to wish for an 
equivalent good fortune in books, but the same 
wisdom, pardoning something to the spirit of 
youth in the choice of companions, should not 
ask youth to meet in books personalities and 

298 



MIXING 

ideas too formidable for its years. In any case, 
what children should read, quite beyond the 
matter of approval (biography is rich in evi- 
dences of the futilities of disapproval), is a 
question that confesses the hazards of influence, 
and since influence is admitted, it is amazing 
that the parallel should so seldom be recog- 
nized, and book-mixing receive consideration 
for the practical bearings of its influence. 

We are accustomed to suggest that many a 
book, resting between elbows on an attic 
floor, has shaped a life, or even a nation. We 
are able without contradiction to show how 
books have established religions and pre- 
cipitated revolutions. That Bolshevism began 
in a book is the sort of fact that is capable, 
in certain quarters, of increasing skepticism 
as to the vaunted benefits of reading. Yet 
with whatever reactions, books do come in for 
recognition after the event. Even an utterly 
practical mind will, for example, acknowledge 
that the boy Lincoln's mixing with books had 
very important results. So long as we speak 
in terms of history, or of biographic revelation, 
book power will not be denied; in fact, sen- 
timentalism likes to dwell upon the idea, 
though it prefers, for strictly dramatic reasons, 
that the book shall be the Lives of the Saints 
or at least Pilgrim's Progress, unless the sub- 
ject person has at last been elected sheriff or 

299 



MIXING 

has arrived securely in the steel business, in 
which event one of those rhapsodies about 
Napoleon fits rather well. 

A present boy is another affair. A present 
boy is not to be depended upon for an enthu- 
siasm about Christian martyrs or any of those 
themes so impressively mentioned in biography 
as having instigated the careers of the success- 
ful. In all probability he shows a disposition 
in favor of Nick Carter. He is bitterly accused 
of having no taste for books that would improve 
him, and of preferring the movies to any books 
whatever. And when he becomes a man it is 
expected he will declare on his own account 
that he has no time to read. 

Having no time to read is seldom stated as a 
dilemma. It is supposed to express a busyness 
in more practical fields. A corking story 
about "success" is all very well. Something 
with zip in it. But a whole evening for some 
dry thing — who has time for that with so 
much "mixing" to do? These bookish people 
unfit themselves fcr the rough and tumble of 
business. 

That book reading should be left so largely 
to women is mentioned as indicating not that 
women have more intelligence, but that they 
have more time. If a better culture is deduced 
from a better reading, most men are adept at 
relinquishing the honors on the ready theory 

300 



MIXING 

that they have no time for culture; moreover, 
culture is ever under the suspicion of being a 
ladylike sort of thing that doesn't get you 
anywhere. 

The theory of not having time has one im- 
portant bearing — it relieves men of the obli- 
gation to read the talked-about book and 
avoids the stigma that rests so heavily upon 
those who have the time and fail. Many 
people live in a vast fear of being caught in a 
haven't-read-it minority, and of the parallel 
misery of reading something that no one ever 
speaks of. In defensive reading only the 
noisy is necessary. Defensive travel carries 
the same compulsion. You see only the things 
upon which you will be cross-examined by 
those who have also traveled defensively. 
Thus one sort of mixing forbids reading and 
another sort enforces it; both see obligation 
and neither sees privilege. Book reading as a 
privilege, as an enlarger of life, as a mental 
mixing that has vital and extraordinary pos- 
sibilities, is left to the discovery and enjoy- 
ment of minds with an unbruised initiative. 
The young are likely to own this initiative. 
As a birthright it is always in peril, not only 
from false teaching or false example, but from 
contemptuous pressure. In the matter of 
book reading, most men seem to live on the 
interest of an early investment. No rhap- 

301 



MIXING 

sodic mood should lead the champion of litera- 
ture to overlook the strain upon the world's 
workers or dismiss too quickly the question of 
an easy choice in the brief period of possible 
recreation permitted by the average American's 
business habits. Yet it is the driven worker 
in particular who has most to get from the 
right book. American business may be a fast 
game, but it is no more exhausting than the 
labor of those who in a day of vastly longer 
labor nourished their minds by the light of a 
candle. Books that have shaped lives still 
live, and are still being written by and about 
the great of the earth. 

If one were writing an "inspirational" mes- 
sage it might be pardonable to say to young 
or old: "When you mix, mix with all sorts and 
conditions, for the good of your soul. But 
don't omit the big ones. The world's greatest 
are worth meeting. Your chances of meeting 
them in the flesh may not be good. And if you 
do meet them you may get only a fragment of 
their attention, a mere hint of what lies in 
them. Yet the great men you are free to 
meet in books give you their best. You may 
choose your time. You may meet them with- 
out embarrassment. You may listen without 
hurry. You may leave them and come back. 
You will know that you have had access to 
the greatest forces of all time and that you 

302 



MIXING 

are the better fitted to measure other forces, 
to understand to-day by a better knowledge 
of yesterday, to profit by the ordinary contacts 
of your own life, to be yourself more of a 
force in the world, to enjoy more your most 
persistent companion — yourself. And you will 
be able to call yourself a real mixer." 



THE END 



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